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BOOKS BY LEWIS MVMFORD

THE STORY OF UTOPIAS 1922

STICKS AND STONES 1924

THE GOLDEN DAY 1926

HERMAN MELVILLE 1929

THE BROWN DECADES 1931

MEN MUST ACT 1939

FAITH FOR LIVING 1940

THE SOUTH IN ARCHI-
TECTURE 1941

CITY DEVELOPMENT 1945

VALUES FOR SURVIVAL 1946

GREEN MEMORIES 1947

I. TECHNICS AND

CIVILIZATION 1934

II. THE CULTURE OF

CITIES 1938

III. THE CONDITION OF

MAN 1944

IV. THE CONDUCT OF

LIFE 1951

THE CONDUCT
OF LIFE

BY LEWIS MUMFORD

SECKER & WARBURG, LONDON, 1952

First published in Great Britain, 1952, by

Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

7 John Street, Bloomsbury, London, W.C.i

PRINTED AND BOUND IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, LONDON AND EDINBURGH

With this book the series on which I began work in 1930 comes to a
close.

In these volumes I have sought to deal in a unified way with mar^s
nature, his work, and his life-dramas, as revealed in the development
of contemporary Western civilization. By intention, these books outline
a philosophy, demonstrate a method of synthesis, and project further a
new pattern of life that has, for at least a century, been in process of
emergence. Though I reserved for The Conduct of Life — and my own
further maturity — a discussion of the final problems of man^s nature,
destiny, and purpose, the present volume, so far from being an epi-
logue, is in fact a preface to the earlier books. While each volume
stands alone, they modify each other; and the full import of any one
cannot be grasped without an understanding of the other three.

During the period covered by the writing of these books grave changes
for the worse have taken place throughout the world. But if the evils
that now threaten mankind are more appalling than ever before, the
reward for facing them and overcoming them promises also to be
greater. When the lethal contents of Pandorals box were released, the
Gods, taking pity on man, left him with one gift that would enable him
to survive every natural plague or human mischief: Hope. Despite
the shocks and sorrows of the last two decades, Hope abides and
‘‘maketh not ashamed'' Even if the present crisis continues for another
generation, even if it brings forth a succession of catastrophes, it is
already time to prepare for the renewal of life. To that end these four
books have, from the beginning, been dedicated.

L. M.

Amenia, New York
Spring, 1951

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL 3

1: The Promise of Our Age 3

2: Canvass of Possibilities 5

3: Diagnosis of Our Times 11

4: Alternatives to Catastrophe 18

CHAPTER 11. ORIENTATION TO LIFE 22

1: Postulates of Synthesis 22

2; The Nature of Man 25

3: The Background of Life 27

4: Economy of the Superfluous 34

5: Social Discovery and Fabrication 36

6: The Miracle of Language 39

7: The Interpretation of Dreams 45

8: Man as Interpreter 51

CHAPTER III. COSMOS AND PERSON 58

1: On the Use of Unanswerable Questions 58

2: The Mythologies of Man 62

3: The Emergence of the Divine 66

4: Eternity, Sex and Death 76

5: Sacrifice and Detachment 82

6: Religion’s Positive Functions 86

CHAPTER IV. THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN 92

1 : The Birth of the Person 92

2: The Universal Mask 94

3: The Social Process of Conversion 100

vti

viii

CONTENTS

4: Bias Against the Personal 107

5: Next Development of Religion 112

6: The Universal Commitment 118

CHAPTER V. THE BASIS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 121

1 : Man’s Will to Form 121

2: Needs and Values 125

3: The Case for Purpose 130

4: The Nature of Design 134

5: The Organic Hierarchy 140

6: The Control of Quantity 144

CHAPTER VI. BEYOND MORAL AMBIGUITIES 148

1 : “Modern Man Can Do No Wrong” 148

2: Conditions for Moral Renewal 152

3: The Challenge of Evil 156

4: The Salt of Life 160

5: Chronometricals and Horologicals 165

6: Repentance and Re-affirmation 170

CHAPTER VIL THE FULFILLMENT OF MAN 175

1 : The Fallacy of Systems 175

2 : The Reason for Balance 180

3: Types and Temperaments 192

4: The Whole Man as Ideal Type 196

5: The Incarnation of Balance 205

CHAPTER VIIL THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL 216

1: The Optimism of Pathology 216

2: Doctrine of the Whole 223

3: On Reaching a Singular Point 226

4: An Organic Syncretism 232

5: Eutopianism and Universalism 235

6: The New Mutation 240

CONTENTS ix

CHAPTER IX. THE WAY AND THE LIFE 244

1 : Preparation for Development 244

2: The Inner Eye and Voice 252

3: Time for Living 257

4: The Great Good Place 262

5; The Need for Two Lives 265

6: Stripping for Action 268

7 : Re-union with the Group 274

8: Discipline for Daily Life 281

9 : Love and Integration 284

10: The Renewal of Life 288

BIBLIOGRAPHY 293

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 318

INDEX 319

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

CHAPTER 1.

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

1: THE PROMISE OF OUR AGE

The age that we live in threatens worldwide catastrophe; but it like-
wise holds forth unexpected hope and unexampled promise. Ours is
no time for faint-hearted men. No matter how rugged the obstacles
that confront us, we must push on, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, not heeding
the Worldly Wisemen who are torpid to the danger and fearful of the
promise. If we do not sink into the Slough of Despond, we may yet
find our way to the Delectable Mountains and to that fair land where
the sun shines night and day. The shadows that now fall across our
path measure the height we have still to climb.

Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close
to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic
energies, if they are handled by disoriented and demoralized men?
But the very threat of general disintegration has also increased the
possibility for a rapid and radical improvement in the condition of
man. The most generous dreams of the past have now become imme-
diate practical necessities: a worldwide co-operation of peoples, a
more just distribution of all the goods of life; the use of knowledge
and energy for the service of life, and the use of life itself for the ex-
tension of the human spirit to provinces where human values and pur-
poses could not heretofore penetrate. If we awaken in time to over-
come the automatisms and irrational compulsions that are now push-
ing the nations toward destruction, we shall create a universal com-
munity. Even if we awaken only belatedly, the fresh insight and the
new philosophy that might have saved us in the first place will be
needed to carry us through the dark days ahead.

The renewal of life is the burden and challenge of our time: its
urgency lightens its risks and its difficulties. For the first time in his-
tory, the tribes and nations have the means of entering into an active
partnership, as wide and unrestricted as the planet itself. Universal

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

fellowship, which the higher religions conceived for many millenni-
ums as mankind’s destiny, now has become technically feasible as
well as ideally conceivable: to seal that promise with acts of political
and economic co-operation on a worldwide scale has likewise become
a practical imperative.

Nothing short of such a transformation will keep the human race
from sliding back still further into barbarism: a barbarism whose
powers of destruction have been multiplied by the very scientific knowl-
edge that most modern thinkers, up to our own age, believed a sure
guarantee of the continued advance of civilization. The rational con-
duct of life, plainly, demands something far different from the auto-
matic extension of science and invention.

The age of the machine is already over. We cannot save our cun-
ning inventions and our complicated apparatus of scientific research
unless we save man; and when we do so, the human person, not the
machine, will dominate the scene. The New World Symphony of ex-
ploration and conquest, and the Ballet Mecanique of modern indus-
trialism, have both been performed to the point of exhaustion. The
next number on the program will be scored for a full orchestra and
a multitude of human voices, like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: a
mass for the dead, a hymn for the living, a paean to the unborn: the
Oratorio of One World and of a new man capable of being at home
in that world.

For each of us, the moment of reorientation and renewal has come.
There is no mechanical device capable of effecting this transformation
in society: it must first take place in the minds and hearts of individ-
ual men, who have the courage to re-educate themselves to the realities
of the present human situation, and, step by step, take command of it.
Up to the limits of his capacities and insights, each one of us must
undertake his self-examination, re-appraise his standards and values,
alter his attitudes and expectations, and re-direct his interest. That
hour will demand a capacity for humility and sacrifice difficult under
any circumstances; but particularly difiicult to a generation for whom
these words awaken only contempt or self-justifying resistance. Hence
the main purpose of this book is to assist in the necessary self-appraisal,
as the first means toward getting ready for playing a part in the new
drama of life.

If man were “just an animal” he would never have found that fact
out. If he were “just a machine” he could never have invented ma-
chines. If his existence were in fact purposeless, he might have sur-

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

vived without having a conscious purpose of his own; but he would
never have been concerned with his own further development; and
he would not have found it impossible to fulfill his animal needs
without finding a place for them in some wider plan of life which
transforms biological need into social ritual and social ritual into sig-
nificant forms of communal and personal drama. For man existence is
a continued process of self -fabrication and self-transcendence. Today,
this act of self-understanding is the fiirst step toward renewal: for each
of us has a new part to master, a new role to enact, a new personality
to shape, and new potentialities of life to fulfill.

The heroes of the old drama, proud, self-willed, formidable men,
aggressive in action, isolationist in thought, will become the clowns
and villains in the new; and those who were once cast for supernumer-
ary parts will find themselves, because of their capacity for mutual
aid, in the very center of the stage. For the renewal of life is the new
drama of life. The main task of our time is to turn man himself, now
a helpless mechanical puppet, into a wakeful and willing creator.

2: CANVASS OF POSSIBILITIES

The potentialities of the present age have often been childishly mis-
conceived. Too readily, we extol our mistakes and miscarriages, and
overlook our latent virtues. That is why it is important, at the begin-
ning, to make a fresh tally of the new conditions that confront us and
the new paths of development that lie ahead.

First of all, we must reject the popular Baconian notion that the
‘‘advancement of learning” and the progress of mechanical inven-
tions will automatically bring about the improvement of man’s estate,
if man’s own welfare and self-realization are included in that hope.
The fact is that the inventions the twentieth century once innocently
boasted, in Mr H. G. Weils’ highly accurate “Anticipations,” have
proved, like the magical promises in a fairy tale, to have an imex-
pectedly wry or sinister outcome. The more godlike our powers have
become, the more demonic our applications of this power have often
turned out. At the beginning of this century. Dr Richard Bucke gave
the approaching conquest of the air as one of the three changes that
would transform mankind: he did not have the slightest foreboding
that it might turn great cities into graveyards.

We can no longer naively believe, then, that human improvement
will follow directly from man’s conquest of nature: indeed, when that

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

triumph is too thorough, when we remove too much of the forest cover,
or extract too many elements from the soil, or activate too large a
quantity of fissionable elements, it may have precisely the opposite
effect.

‘"Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.” The fact that physical
scientists have penetrated the interior of the atom and have begun to
explore the outer edges of astronomical space does not in itself prom-
ise to better the general human condition, though it makes life more
significant to astronomers and physicists. There is no hope for human
salvation, or even mere relief from our present anxieties and obses-
sions, in the fact that we can shoot rockets into the stratosphere and al-
ready begin to dream of Magellan voyages around the solar system.
Some of our mechanical inventions have been beneficent, many are
trivial or life-harassing; but the only question is: What kind of culture
and what manner of man do they tend to produce? Even an economy
of abundance will not serve us if it is not directed toward the fulfill-
ment of life: its utmost plenitude may only choke us or defile us, as
similar wealth traditionally ruined so many great princes and em-
perors.

Our blessings and our promises are actually of a quite different
order than those proclaimed by the older prophets of mechanical
progress. One can condense most of them into the simple proposition
that man, during the last century, has extended the possibilities of full
human development to every member of his species. Up to the present
age, all the advances brought about by civilized societies have rested
mainly on slavery and forced labor, upon people too fully committed
to the day’s work ever to extract the spiritual benefit of their own ef-
forts, too grossly exploited even to realize that alternatives might exist.
Only small groups of people, aristocratic minorities, jealously guard-
ing their privileges but rarely making full use of their advantages,
have enjoyed the usufruct of civilization itself.

But today, for the first time, the human race as a whole commands
resources that have hitherto been perverted or restricted, partly be-
cause of their original scarcity, for the benefit of a fortunate minor-
ity: in a fashion never so true before, we live by helping one another,
and we shall live better by helping each other to the utmost. Now, at
least potentially, every person has a claim to the highest goods of
life: sensibility, intelligence, feeling, insight, all that goes toward the
development of the person are no longer the property of a single ruling
group or a chosen nation. This equalized potentiality for life and for

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

development is the true promise of democracy: a promise so vivid
and so impelling that even those who now practice tyranny and com-
pulsion in the most wanton fashion must nevertheless do so under the
slogan of establishing a “people’s democracy.”

Through five centuries of exploration and invention, Western man
has opened up the globe and brought its peoples into direct contact
with each other. Though the nineteenth century prophets of mechan-
ical progress hoped for too much to come about automatically through
the spread of the machine, it would be an equal error to underestimate
these effects; for rapid flight and instantaneous communication and
global commerce at least provide the technical facilities, hitherto
lacking, for worldwide intercourse and co-operation. For the first time
in history, man has achieved the basis for a unified world: the state
foretold by Isaiah. In that unity, once it has been translated into daily
practices, lies such an abundance of life as no commonwealth or
empire, however powerful, ever possessed. But this transformation
will be incomplete until it is directed primarily to the fulfillment of
the human person: the desirable end-product is neither energy nor
knowledge nor wealth but men.

Originally, people conceived themselves as living in a wholly self-
contained world, designed for their private purposes. In overcoming
his illusions about this world, modern man, since Copernicus, often
also lost interest in himself, and in purposes and ends that both cre-
ated and directed, but also transcended himself. Though he explored,
with increasing success, both astronomical space and molecular space,
he lost sight of his inner world and tended to defame the special ca-
pacities he exhibited: the capacity .for detached evaluation, for rational
interpretation, for purposeful anticipations and significant dreams.
Today, fortunately, modem man has returned, by way of positive
science, to the very attributes of personality he thought a few centuries
ago he had dismissed forever.

Man finds himself involved in processes that reach beyond the de-
velopment and fulfillment of his individual life, or even of mankind’s
historic existence: processes to which his own existence adds a new
dimension of meaning. Both the creative and the destructive forces,
once widely dispersed throughout nature, are now concentrated in
man: in the domain of meaning his culture has the same order of
magnitude as the phenomena it interprets. For better or worse, man’s
responsibilities, his anxieties, his potentialities, have all increased.
Powers once crudely represented as angels, principalities, and thrones

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

may yet, by man’s untrammeled inventiveness, be brought into exist-
ence. Watching the birds soar through the air, man long dreamed of
flight; observing the dream-images rising from his unconscious, mod-
ern man will again shape a new self and a new environment, as dif-
ferent from those of past cultures as Chartres Cathedral is from a dark
empty cave. In this game, man is hut at the beginning of his devel-
opment.

Up to now, men have not found it easy to throw off their tribal
selves and work within a more imiversal mold. Perhaps men will never
completely overcome their self-love, with its regressive particularities
and partialities: constant reminders of the closed society, with its
limited ‘‘consciousness of kind,” out of which wider associations and
organizations eventually grew. But the proportion between self-love
and mutual aid may he altered: only the other day, the mutual aid of
the family was extended through unrra to hungry peoples on every
continent. Today mankind is possibly on the brink of a large-scale
reversal of the relation of the instinctual to the rational, of the tribal
to the universal, of the habitual to the conscious, of closed to open
forms of co-operation. Aided by the expansion of his technical facili-
ties — ^but aided even more by deeper insight into the processes of
human growth — ^the position of dominance for the primitive impulses
and attitudes and subordination for the more highly developed ones
may be reversed. The very ferocity with which men have sought to
recover primitive and tribal ways — the return to “blood and soil,” to
isolationism, to terrorism and compulsion in government — may actu-
ally be a sign that their final breakup approaches.

Fortimately, periods of extreme ^disruption are often favorable to
a wider integration: it was in such a period that Hebraism, Hellenism,
Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and many other partial religious insights
detached themselves from the societies that had brought them forth
and united in the Christian myth, which gave them a wider province.
As long as hope and faith are possible, we may reasonably assume
that such a transformation now opens before us. Like most great
changes, this one has already begun in a preparatory reorientation of
concepts and ideas; and our new philosophy makes it possible to bring
back into rational discourse and into the domain of significant ex-
perience many of the insights of art and religion that were necessarily
thrust to one side by the pragmatic ideology of the machine. In the
course of this book, I shall examine some of these concepts and show
how radically they affect our plans and actions.

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

Turning from the natural world to the specific realm of human
culture, man finds a world as extensive and densely populated as the
heavens themselves; indeed, without the aid of his words and symbols
and patterns of culture, external nature would be inconceivable —
almost invisible. Man stands at a busy crossroads where he directs the
flow of traffic between the past and the future: his present, correctly
viewed, is a composite of seen and unseen forces derived from the
past, and anticipated or potential forces, directed back into the pres-
ent from an ideal future. As Korzybski once put it, in a phrase that
says as much as the whole book that contained it, man is a time-
binding animal: he lives in three dimensions of time as well as space.
Without that temporal depth, itself the product of human culture, the
present would be so meaningless as to be non-existent.

But it is not alone through his deepened self-consciousness or through
the agency of directed scientific thought that man finds himself on the
brink of a decisive constructive change, as the alternative to further
disintegration. Whereas other civilizations, in similar moments, were
faced with a definite shrinkage of life, we behold quite different con-
ditions and prospects. No Polybius can point to the worldwide falling
of the birth rate; no Cyprian can say that Nature herself is ceasing to
support life. In a single century, the population of the earth has
doubled — ^the result of an increased food supply and the more hy-
gienic care of the young. Despite reckless misuse, man’s vital assets
were never greater than now; and there is a fund of reserve vitality,
visible today in countries whose net reproduction rate was once dwin-
dling, ready to be released if occasion demands. Observe the rise of
the birth rate in many Western countries during the last decade. Even
with only our present knowledge of organic processes, we can reforest
the earth and create such a plenitude of raw materials as will enable
a keen and sinewy race to flourish in every part of the planet. So, too,
with our command of energy: a new period of sun-power and electric
power is at hand that will utilize current income, instead of dissipating
our capital reserves of wood, coal, petroleum, or uranium. The out-
put of our machines will rise, while the role of the machine in life
itselt will diminish; many instrumental processes that still remain
uppermost in human consciousness, because of their imperfection, will
presently be transferred to automata. Vitality and energy are the natu-
ral foundations of a higher life: never before did mankind have such
an abundance of both to tap.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

These benefits are plainly only of a preparatory nature; and they
are small and insignificant compared to the approaching mobilization
of man’s greatest source of developments: the cultural heritage itself,
now divided, dispersed, and very largely dissipated through lack of
organs of communication. We now sta . at the beginning of an age
of cultural cross-fertilization, the meeting of the East and the West,
the North and the South: the first true age of man. Even the most
primitive of such interchanges has already had immense results on
human life: witness the original transmission of printing from Korea
and China to the Western World. It is only a few hundred years since
the Chinese classics became available to the West, or Christian reli-
gion and Western science penetrated the Orient. Only a century and
a half have passed since Sanskrit was first translated into English;
and the human race is still only at the beginning of a new epoch,
when all its national and racial possessions, once regarded as isolated
and exclusive, shall be universally shared.

But the promise before us is plain: a planetary interchange, not
merely of goods but of people, not merely of knowledge but of ideas,
values, ideals, scientific discoveries, religious insights, patterns of life.
These possibilities define the new goals of human development.

The Maitreyan Age, long prophesied by the Buddhists, the age of
balance and organic symmetry, lies before us: the dialectic opposite
of the age of specialism, division, and disintegration from which we
must now emerge. Fullness, wholeness, exuberance, balance, mutual
aid: these are the words that characterize the potentialities of our age
and set it off from times of low vitality, dearth, miserliness, isolation,
painful specialization, cultural regression. The greater number of men,
in every historic civilization, have lived only partial, fragmentary
lives, beset by anxiety, limited in understanding and action, confined
mainly to the surface of their meager acres and the even narx*ower
boundaries set by their own skins: lives not yet human except by
promise and intention.

But here and there in history one notes a sudden concentration of
energies, a more favorable constellation of social opportunities, an
almost worldwide upsurge of prophetic anticipation, disclosing new
possibilities for the race: so it was with the worldwide changes in
the sixth century b.c. symbolized by Buddha, Solon, Zoroaster, Com
fucius, and their immediate successors, changes that gave common
values and purposes to people too far separated physically for even
Alexander the Great to unite them. Out of still deeper pressures, anx-

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

ieties, insecurities, a corresponding renewal on an even wider scale
now seems about to open for mankind.

Today man is like a mountain climber who must leap at his peril
over a formidable crevasse, in order to continue his upward way;
and to make the physical jump he will have to draw on all his per-
sonal resources. If he be too weak or cowardly to make the eliort,
he will freeze in his present position, unable to climb up or down,
until cold or terror or fatigue, or some combination of all these, forces
him to lose his grip and fall to his death. No small reluctant efforts
will overcome the conditions that threaten not simply the advance,
but the sheer animal survival, of the human race. True, man has never
made this leap and there is no guarantee that he will reach the other
side: but the upward ascent now beckons as it never beckoned before,
and above the parting clouds we can now discern the nearest of the
sunlit peaks. If we have faith, we shall reach the other side. But first,
we must take the measure of our dangers; for a half-way leap will
prove as mortal as no leap at all.

3: DIAGNOSIS OF OUR TIMES

Perhaps fortunately, there is a negative pressure toward the trans-
formation of modern man: without it, the positive advantages and op-
portunities might not move him sufficiently to action. We have reached
a point in history where man has become his own most dangerous
enemy. At the moment he boasts of conquering nature, he surrenders
his higher capacities, and he weakens his ability outside the limited
framework of science for co-ordinated thought and disciplined action.
Today it is man’s higher functions that have become automatic and
constricted and his lower ones that have become spontaneous and irre-
pressible. We arrest our inner creativity with external compulsions and
irrelevant anxieties, at the mercy of constant interruptions by telephone
and radio and insistent print, timing our lives to the movement of a
production belt we do not control. At the same time, we give author-
ity to the stomach, the muscles, the genitals — to animal reflexes that
produce obedient consumers, whip-wielding man-trainers, slavish po-
litical subjects, push-button automatons.

The failure to respond to this situation is a symptom of the very
disease that has brought it about. Unlike his electronic thinking ma-
chines, the civilization modern man has built is not so contrived that,
when it goes wrong as a whole, it will issue a warning signal and halt

in its operation. Indeed, our emotions and feelings, which would nor-
mally provide these signals, have in fact been deliberately extirpated,
in order to make the machine work more smoothly. Worse than that:
so habitually have our minds been committed to the specialized, the
fragmentary, the particular, and so uncommon is the habit of viewing
life as a dynamic inter-related system, that we cannot on our own
premises recognize when civilization as a whole is in danger; nor can
we readily accept the notion that no part of it will be safe or sound
until the whole is reorganized. Hence the fatuous degree of optimism
people continue to exhibit, though valuable areas of our civilization
are already destroyed and even greater sectors, perhaps, have be-
come meaningless.

The visible symptoms of our present state are numerous: if they
are too well known to be repeated, they are also too generally neg-
lected to be taken for granted. They range from the mass extermina-
tion of an estimated eighteen million people by the Nazis, some six
million of these being Jews, extermination accompanied by every con-
ceivable refinement of brutality and torture, to the cold genocide prac-
ticed by my own countrymen — ^the 180,000 Japanese civilians killed
by fire bombs in Tokyo in one night, or the 200,000 people [final
estimate] who were instantly incinerated, or mutilated and eventually
doomed to die, in Hiroshima in the course of a few seconds.

During the last thirty years between forty and fifty million people,
at a rough estimate, have met premature death through war and geno-
cide alone. In such statistics one has the gross indications of the wide-
spread miscarriage of all our humane intentions, so strenuously ex-
erted in other departments. For every life we learn to save in child-
hood, through advances in hygiene, diet, and medical care, “civilized”
governments, which still threaten each other’s existence, are now pre-
pared to take away indiscriminately a score of lives, in acts of planned
genocide. These acts, by their very nature, will make impossible any
rational settlement capable of promoting fellowship and mumaT aid.
In such a situation the only remedy for total insecurity would be to|aI
extermination.

Now there is no doubt that our recurrent world wars have brought
to the surface more speedily many evils that might have remained
latent for a longer period; but it would be foolish, I believe, to look
to a single institution or a single set of events for the full explanation
of our present condition. All social phenomena, almost without ex-
ception, are the result of a multitude of converging and interacting

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

events; and therefore to single out any one of them — as Christian
theologians did in their providential interpretation of history, or as
Marxians now do in their economic interpretation of history — is by
that very act to misread the nature of human society itself. Wars have
indeed aggravated all our difficulties today; but we would do ill to
attribute to war alone the breakdown that was already visible to pene-
trating observers from one to two generations earlier, in a period that
now seems incredibly peaceful. War is both the product of an earlier
corruption and a producer of new corruptions. The wars of our time
have only brought out a destructiveness and a denial of life that were
latent in this society: they were in a sense the negative alternatives to
a general renewal that no ruling class was self-denying enough to
sanction.

At all events, our present moral breakdown has long been under
way. Wholly engrossed in the fabrication of machines and the exploi-
tation of nature, we had neglected the proper education of man.
Through our skill in invention, we had created a highly complicated
and inter-related world community whose very existence depended
upon religious and moral values we permitted to lapse. Western civ-
ilization has lived for more than a century under the sign of power:
forgetting, in our pride, that uncontrolled power in any of its manifes-
tations, as heat, as light, as physical force, as political compulsion,
is inimical to life; for life flourishes only to the extent that it is able
to regulate power, screening off its direct impact and reducing it to
those amounts that are favorable to vital processes. By something
closer than a mere figure of speech, what is true for the single organ-
ism is likewise true for the whole civilization. Our very will-to-survive
is subject to destructive irrational turnings upon itself, as people lose
the sense of a goal and a purpose beyond mere animal existence. Life
proceeds by measure and balance: unlimited and undirected power
is another name for suicide.

The deeper grounds for this relapse into nihilism have still to be
adequately explored. The English poet. A, E. Housman, pictured him-
self ‘^a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” But the fact is
that in the mechanistic world conceived and fabricated by science, man
has become even more of a stranger, and has even more reason to be
afraid.

Western culture no longer represents man: it is mainly outside him,
and in no small measure hostile to his whole self: he cannot take it in.
He is like a patient condemned in the interests of X-ray photography

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

to live Upon a diet of barium sulphate. Indeed, the more intense mod-
ern man’s effort to take in this culture, the more pitiable his actual
condition. There is no , inner relation between man’s organic and per-
sonal needs and the special institutions he has created for the expres-
sion of the power complex. The great city, with its drone of unceasing
mechanical activities, is no longer man writ large: at best, to adapt
himself to his environment, man has reduced himself to a minor
mechanism: the machine writ small. The autonomous activities of the
personality, choice, selection, self-regulation, self-direction, purposive-
ness, all the attributes of freedom and creativeness, have become pro-
gressively more constrained, as external pressures become more per-
vasive and overbearing. In the end, as Samuel Butler satirically
prophesied, man may become just a machine’s contrivance for repro-
ducing another machine.

But something even more disastrous has happened within this ma-
chine culture: life itself, for the ordinary man, though protected and
furthered by a hundred devices that increase his expectation of life,
has become less interesting and less significant: it is at best a mild
slavery, and at its worst, the slavery is not mild. Why should anyone
give to the day’s work the efforts and sacrifices it demands? By his
very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manu-
factured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier
civilizations have ever fathomed: the small variations, the minor ini-
tiatives and choices, the opportunity for using one’s wits, the slightest
expression of fantasy, have disappeared progressively from the daily
tasks of the common man, caught in big organizations that do his think-
ing for him. The most deadly criticism one could make of modern
civilization is that, apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes,
it is not humanly interesting.

To alleviate his boredom modern man has invented an extrava-
gantly complicated outer life, which fills up his leisure hours with
forms of play that are hardly to be distinguished from his work. As
man’s inner life has shriveled, he has recovered a sense of vitality and
purpose by giving release to the most primitive elements in his un-
conscious: the crimes and guilts of Electra, Orestes, Hamlet, Macbeth,
are relatively human expressions compared to the calculated cruelties
and infamies so-called civilized nations have introduced, both in fan-
tasy and in deed.

Apart from these pathological results, our mechanized culture has
produced a pervasive sense of frustration. No one can possibly know

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

more than a fragment of all that might be known, see more than a
passing glimpse of all that might be seen, do more than a few ran-
dom, fitful acts, of all that might, with the energies we now command,
be done: there is a constant disproportion between our powers and our
satisfactions. The typical role of the personality today is an insignifi-
cant one: non-commanding, unpurposeful. The walls of the outer shell
of our life have thickened, and the creature within has diminished in
size in order to accommodate himself to this inimical overgrowth.

The contents of modern man’s daydreams too closely resemble those
of Bloom in Ulysses, filled with the dead tags of newspaper editorials,
the undigested vomit of advertising slogans, greasy crumbs of irrele-
vant information, and the choking dust of purposeless activity. The
duty to become part of this chaos, to keep up with it, to accept it in-
ternally, is the bitter duty of modem man — most adequately described
and analyzed by Waldo Frank, in his description of The American
Jungle, in The Rediscovery of America. Unfortunately, the more busy
the mental traffic, the emptier becomes the resultant life: therefore the
more abjectly dependent the individual atom in this society becomes
upon the very stimuli which — ^though they have, in fact, caused his
emptiness — divert his attention from his plight.

Such a mechanical routine results in a loss of self-confidence and
self-respect that few primitive communities would countenance: in-
deed, the “machine-herd,” as we should properly call this passive
creature, is a poorer animal than the stolidest cow-herd, largely be-
cause he “knows so much that ain’t so.” Hence the current spread of
quackery, superstition, fanaticism, comparable to that which marked
the decline of the Hellenic and Roman order: a growing tendency to
gamble and to believe in Chance as the supreme Goddess of human des-
tiny: the erratic Wheel of Chance being the only possible happy alter-
native to the undeviating iron rails of Fate, on which a declining civili-
zation helplessly rolls.

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes
its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of
spontaneity: r^w animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless
stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned.
Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations,
and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through
a garbage pile for food. Even those who have direct access to the
kitchen do not get properly fed. Our leaders are themselves the victims
of the very system they have helped to create. What Dr Sheldon has

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

called ^‘psychological overcrowding” is the typical mischief of West-
ern civilization in its present aspect. As a result of our very ingenuity
in inventing reproductive and manifolding devices, even the economy
of a stable, abstract medium like print has been lessened; a clumsy
concreteness retards the whole process of thought, and we are as much
handicapped by an excess of data as by a lack of it. So instead of pro-
ducing a new gain of time and energy for the consummations of life,
our uncontrolled mechanization has made it necessary to spend a larger
part of the day on the preparatory means. Final results: a surfeit of
tasks, interests, stimuli, reactions: an absence of valuable order and
purpose.

In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: in-
capable of choice, incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities:
at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost
pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as his choices become
fewer and fewer: finally, a creature governed mainly by his condi-
tioned reflexes — the ideal type desired, if never quite achieved, by
the advertising agency and the sales organizations of modem business,
or by the propaganda office and the planning bureaus of totalitarian
and quasi-totalitarian governments. The handsomest encomium for
such creatures is: “They do not make trouble.” Their highest virtue
is: “They do not stick their necks out.” Ultimately, such a society pro-
duces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned;
the active and the passive barbarians. The exposure of this web of
falsehood, self-deception, and emptiness is perhaps what made Death
of a Salesman so poignant to the metropolitan American audiences that
witnessed it.

Now this mechanical chaos is plainly not self-perpetuating, for it
affronts and humiliates the human spirit; and the tighter and more
efficient it becomes as a mechanical system, the more stubborn will be
the human reaction against it. Eventually, it must drive modern man
to blind rebellion, to suicide, or to renewal: and so far it has worked
in the first two ways. On this analysis, the crisis we now face would
be inherent in our culture even if it had not, by son^ miracle, also
imleashed the more active disintegrations that have taken place in re-
cent history.

In his final state, on the highest levels of our society, modem man
becomes a mixture of two prophetic nineteenth century heroes: Haw-
thorne’s Ethan Brand and Melville’s Captain Ahab — ^both fanatically
concentrated upon a single end. Ethan Brand, pursuing his quest for

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL 17

truth, becomes entirely indifferent to the human results of his work;
rigorously suppressing his emotions, he cuts himself off from the ‘‘mag-
netic chain of humanity.” This dearth of feeling and emotion, this lack
of human-heartedness, is the typical by-product of our traditional con-
ceptions of science. In the same mood of withdrawal modern physicists
concentrated on the development of atomic theory and on the perfection
of instruments leading to the release of atomic energy, without the
faintest concern — until they finally faced the results of their “disin-
terested” activity in a last moment of remorseful panic — about the
social destination of their scientific experiments, though as early as
1914 H. G. Wells had prophetically outlined, in vivid detail, the con-
sequences we now face. This monomaniac concentration on a limited
order of truth, intensified by the withdrawal of human feeling, is, as
Hawthorne saw, the unforgivable sin of modern man.

But there is another side to the modern personality, that of Captain
Ahab: full of pride, anger, self-righteous aggression, conscious through
little Pip of the claims of love, but brushing them aside in order to
pursue his demonic hunt of the White Whale, taking on in his pursuit
of the monster the very character of unreasoning aggression of which
he himself had been the victim earlier. Brand throws himself into his
charcoal furnace, as the physicist may yet consume himself in his
atomic pile; Ahab throws overboard every scientific instrument that
might guide him homeward in order to confine in still narrower chan-
nels his unqualified aggression. Both cases — one through passive with-
drawal and through the drying up of feeling and emotion, the other
through the active expression of the more aggressive and dominating
sides of the personality — result in a fatal extinction of the human, and
a final terminus to further development. Here, rather than in the Faust
legend, are the true myths of modern man.

The conclusion should be plain. All the resources our society now
possesses, all its present energies and vitalities, all its funded values
and ideas, must be concentrated on the upbuilding and regenerative
functions, in both the personality and the community. Where do these
forces exist? By what method can we tap them and apply them? To
what goals shall we direct them? What discipline must we establish
for the daily life, and what system of thought, what body of ideals,
must guide both the person and the community? These questions are
now uppermost in all awakened minds.

But we shall not achieve a more adequate philosophy merely by re-
jecting wholesale our present way of life or by reverting to some sim-

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

pier archaic scheme of life and thought. It is not enough to say, as
Rousseau once did, that one has only to reverse all the current prac-
tices to be right. The cure for our over-concentration on the outer world
is not a recoil into an equally sterile and shut-off inner world ; the' alter-
native to blindly conquering nature is not to neglect nature entirely
and focus wholly on man. If our new philosophy is well grounded we
shall not merely react against the "^‘air-conditioned nightmare” of our
present culture; we shall also carry into the future many of the ele-
ments of positive good that this culture actually embraces — its sense
of impersonal truths that lie beyond mere wishful thinking, its tech-
nique for collective verification, its capacity for directed thought: in-
deed, we shall transfer its sense of order from the too-limited realm
of science to life at large.

4: ALTERNATIVES TO CATASTROPHE

Logically speaking, three main courses are now open to modern man.

First: All the existing institutions may continue to carry forward
the methods and forms of the past, without any effort either to recon-
stitute the overall pattern or to re-orient any single institution. Since,
dominated by our present purposes, these forces, and institutions have
already shown themselves capable of unparalleled destructiveness,
there is no evidence whatever that the vital and upbuilding elements
that are also at work will, without further effort, gain the upper hand
again. On the contrary: the present indications are as clear today as
they were to Augustine in the fourth century a.d. with regard to Rome.
If we continue on our present downward course, at tlie accelerated rate
that marks the last half-century, the end of Western civilization is in
sight: very probably the end of all civilization for another millennium:
possibly even the extinction of life in any form on this planet. For the
first time in history, man has the means in his possession to commit
collective genocide or suicide, on a scale sufficient to envelop the whole
race. The end of the world” is no longer an apocalyptic hyperbole,
now that an atomic chain reaction might bring it to pass.

Second alternative: Western man may make a compulsive attempt
at stabilization and fixation, without bringing about any radical re-
newal or reorientation. This was the method of totalitarian fascism as
practiced in Nazi Germany: a deliberate regression to tribal ideals and
infantile practices, an attempt to throw off the complex inter-relation-
ships, the patient co-operations and accommodations of a developed

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

society, and return to fixed custom, to a servile conditioning of re-
sponses, to untrammeled aggression on the part of the ruling classes.
Though soviet communism began its revolution with a»eutopian vision
of freedom and brotherhood, it has in the course of a single generation
descended to almost the same level of barbarism; and if the present
tensions between ^‘communist” (now actually fascist) Soviet Russia
and the non-communist states continue for any length of time, there
is now plenty of evidence at hand, particularly in the United States,
to show that a similar retreat to barbarism will take place in the very
effort to ward off Russian domination. In America the forces of re-
action, already utilizing irresponsible slander and legal coercion to
silence rational opposition, may easily, under the rabid leadership of
privileged Senatorial demagogues, pass on to the stage of active vio-
lence unless those who believe in freedom and democracy quickly
recover the initiative. No new philosophy, no personal transformation,
no untried mode of action is required for such stabilization by regres- ®
sion: all that is required is a release from civilized inhibitions and a
cringing submission to the criminal and psychotic personalities who
rise to the top in such a situation.

Fortunately, this second alternative is ultimately self-defeating. In
their fear of dangerous thoughts the heads of such a regime tend to
call all thoughts dangerous; so, given enough time, they must succumb,
as the Nazis did, to the general stultification of science and common
sense that results from the very effort to achieve protection. But un-
fortunately, the violence and quackery and fear, which cause totali-
tarian rulers to plunge into a succession of blunders as great as that
which Stalin made in his treaty of collaboration with Hitler, may also
wipe out society at large in the very act that causes barbarism’s own
downfall. What is worse, despite the fact that its ultimate fate is sealed,
a totalitarian regime may well last for at least a century or two, as
Russian Czarism did, before it is corrupted beyond repair by its evils.

Now history shows that even the most successful efforts at stabiliza-
tion by fixation and compulsion, such as that begun under Constantine
the Great in the Eastern Empire, or under the Papacy in the West, do
not offer anything more hopeful than a long period of hibernation.
Perhaps the happiest effort, since it re-trained many humane attributes,
was that which took place in Rome under the Empire, from Augustus
to Trajan. An even more successful effort was that which took place
in the Roman Catholic Church, from the thirteenth century on, in its
effort to preserve and perpetuate medieval civilization: the state ffiat

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

was ideologically crystallized in the Summa Theologia of Thomas
Aquinas. Relying upon compulsion because it now lacked the power
to conjure up f^ith or impel consent by more patient rational methods,
the Inquisition became the typical organ of this kind of effort. In the
end the Church saved itself, but only at the price of losing hold over
the rest of Western society.

Third alternative: •‘But today another course opens: this is compar-
able to that which opened in Rome in the fifth century a.d. when the
Christian Church laid the basis in faith and thought and practice for a
new society. Out of the immense vitalities of our present civilization, a
dynamic integration and renewal may still take place. This will not
come by following the path of least resistance; nor will it come by ef-
fecting a succession of small, unco-ordinated, day-to-day modifications
and reforms: it involves nothing less than a change in the total pattern
of life, working simultaneously throughout every institution, group, and
person in society: not at first necessarily commanding a majority, but
at least taking hold of a ‘^saving remnant,” whose new vision and new
practices will in time be transfused through every part of the commu-
nity. Such a change does not come about purely by rational decision:
it will come, probably, only as the outcome of a crisis so threatening,
so calamitous in its possibilities, so empty of easier alternatives, that
something like a spontaneous collective decision will be possible —
much like that which roused the British people after Dunkirk. At that
point, the bounds of possibility will be widened: that which ordinarily
could not be done will be done.

Even now, the fateful constellation of forces I have been describing
has probably come about; and if we are not to bow passively to catas-
trophe or cower under the totalitarian compulsions that will, so to say,
freeze catastrophe into the stable form of our society, we must make
the personal decisions and undertake the heroic duties and efforts that
will bring about a collective regeneration. To understand the nature of
this situation, to extend the knowledge and to re-create the values nec-
essary for our survival and our salvation, is in fact the main purpose
of the present book.

Such, then, are the alternatives we face today. We may either follow
the downward cycle of de-building, devaluation, and disintegration,
till life is not either attractive or endurable, or we may achieve a brief,
illusory reprieve by committing the latent forces of life to the process
of fixation and stabilization: a negative kind of renewal, in which the
lower forms of life will supplant the higher, in which mind and spirit

THE CHALLENGE TO RENEWAL

will be sacrificed to power, in which organized criminality will become
the established government.

By this second process we may outwardly arrest the present diseases
of our civilization and keep them from spreading; but only by creating
a kind of living death for everyone. And as the patient whose limbs are
in a plaster cast may by his relief from pain have the illusion of im-
provement, before gangrene sets in, so a nation that has arrested the
processes of decay by stabilizing on a Jow level, may have, as in Nazi
Germany or in other totalitarian countries today, the sense of being
the healthy exponents of a new form of life. This is but a momentary
illusion. The totalitarian drug is as fatal as the infection it arrests.

Thus the inertia of “progress” today leads swiftly downhill; while
the attempt to achieve stabilization by collective compulsion and social
arrest likewise leads to the same destination — death. Only one road
lies open to those who would remain human: the road of renewal. Each
one of us must dedicate himself, at whatever efiort, with whatever will-
ing sacrifice, to such a transformation of himself and all the groups
and associations in which he participates, as will lead to law and order,
to peace and co-operation, to love and brotherhood, throughout the
planet. Since the terms of this transformation are familiar ones, it is
the situation itself and the method we bring to it, that will make the
difference, changing the empty professions that have so long gone un-
heeded into operative principles and tangible goals.

CHAPTER IL

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

1: POSTULATES OF SYNTHESIS

Plainly, a profound change in goals and purposes is an essential
basis for the new life that must germinate, if the development of man
is to go on. But this alone is not sufficient. Socialism, during the nine-
teenth century, projected far-reaching changes in society to introduce
justice and humane co-operation at the expense of private property
and privilege. Many of these changes have already been effected, even
in nominally capitalist regimes. But socialism sought to effect these
changes without transforming the psychological potentials of its ad-
herents, Believing in the spontaneous goodness of man, it assumed that
the evils in the body politic were wholly external to its members, that
capitalism and militarism could be replaced without creating disci-
plines to transform greed, avarice, luxury, pride, aggression, and regi-
mentation. As a result socialism in practice often shows characteristics
uncomfortably like the system it has partly replaced.

But it would be equally faulty, in the light of our present knowledge,
to seek merely an inner change: that was the mistake of the Greek phi-
losophers after Plato: they sought only the salvation of enlightened
individuals, capable of discourse at their own high level of abstraction.
They had nothing to offer the mass of men, and no vision of the gen-
eral renewal of society.

We need a doctrine which, because it aims at the transformation and
development of the person, will be capable of guiding aiid re-directing
the energies of men in groups and associations: an ethical discipline
and an education capable of giving human institutions and organiza-
tions the potentials for freedom we so far find — and still only spo-
radically here — in individual persons. To this end, we must create a
framework of more adequate concepts and ideas, capable of enclosing
every dimension of life. This framework so far is not yet supplied

by any single system of philosophy or religion. Above all, we need ^

ORIENTATION TO LIFE 23

an ideology so profoundly organic that it will be capable of bringing
together the severed halves of modern man, the private and the public,
the inner and the outer, the domain of freedom, emergence, creative-
ness, and the domain of necessity. In short, before modern man can
live a sane life he must escape his present ideological strait jackets.

Each one of us sees the world through a screen: the screen of his
physical constitution and his temperament, his vocation and his varied
social roles, his family*" relations and his other group affiliations, his
personal philosophy and the total body of his culture. While each of
these aspects is typical every actual experience is unique; so one might
easily assume that their collective expression would lead mainly to
hallucinations, cross-purposes, self-deceptive projections, and errors.
But all these screens, apparently so different and divergent, are them-
selves the results of the continued transformations of life, the ceaseless
interactions between organism and environment. Their very incongru-
ities are the products of a common medium, a common process, com-
mon tasks and common ends: so that the world is not in fact a shatte r-
in g chaos but a cosmos, in which error and illusion can be detected
b ecause they occur as erratic elements on a ground pattern of order .
T his underlying unity makes significant difference possihla

From one end of creation to another we must not merely posit a
unifying process that underlies all variety and diversity: we must also
posit a direction of change: a set toward life and mind and conscious-
ness. Life occurs indeed at a very late stage in cosmic evolution: or-
ganized mind at a still later stage, and human beings, with conscious-
ness, rational purposes, and free choices, last of all. Quantitatively
speaking, life seems extremely rare and precious, even in the humblest,
least sentient forms: the nearest solar system that might be disposed
favorably toward life is, the astronomers tell us, about four and a half
light years away. But the emergence of life and mind gives fresh sig-
nificance to every preparatory activity. Values and purposes, so far
from being trivial human interventions in cosmic events that deny them,
exist as poteiftialities at the lowest levels and become increasingly evi-
dent, indeed increasingly dominant, at each upward stage.

In the world of nature it is becoming plain that physical events can-
not be fully understood except with reference to the pattern of the
whole in time and space. No analysis of the parts and no mere addi-
tion of analyses and abstractions will ever give any insight into the
pattern or purposive configuration that endows them with a special sig-

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

nificance: indeed, this organic relationship will not even be suspected
when methods of abstraction and isolation are the sole ones employed.

What applies to the “physical world” applies even more to the per-
son. Even the most primitive physical phenomena may be quite inade-
quately interpreted — as “merely” of a thermal or electrical nature —
if the ultimate tendency of the evolutionary process is not kept in
view. No definition of matter is complete unless one adds that certain
elements have the potentiality for uniting in complex organic units
which produce the phenomena of life. More than this: the philosophy
of Lao-tse, the plays of Moliere, the equations of Gauss, may all be
unique events in the history of the universe: but they are still events,
just as real in their uniqueness as mass phenomena that have been re-
peated a billion billion times. A philosophy that would dismiss these
events as xmreal or insignificant, in order to reduce matter to “nothing
but” electrons or neutrons, violates the simplest canons of truth. What
it dismisses as unreal is merely what discloses the limits of its system
of interpretation.

Does it not follow, then, that the current speculations of the astro-
physicists on the earliest shaking down of order in the universe, or the
equally marvelous penetration by the nuclear physicist into the con-
stitution of the atom, are still insufficient if they stop short of the unique
and unpredictable events which begin to appear, in increasing number,
with the development of man himself? The newer insights in physi-
cal science point to this fact. However blind and repetitive physical
processes once seemed to be when living forms were left out of account,
some initial taint of tendency and purpose and creativeness seems to
have been present from the beginning: and in turn the destination casts
a retrospective meaning over every earlier stage on the journey.

Many of man’s latter-day inventions, products of his own evolving
needs, have been anticipated in organic forms at far earlier stages: he
took his paper-making from the hornets; he copied the soaring birds
in his airplane ; he re-invented organized society, based on the division
of labor, about sixty million years after the ants had perfected their
own. Part of man’s own development consists in a conscious reconstruc-
tion and re-appraisal of nature’s processes, so that he may make them
serve ends that play no part in nature except in man himself. But if a
philosophy of synthesis must emphasize the last stages of this long
process, the attributes of freedom, uniqueness, self-direction, it cannot
remain indifferent, like past forms of subjective idealism, to all that

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

man owes to the energies and vitalities that preceded his own emer-
gence. Continuity: emergence: creativity — these are the basic postu-
lates of the new synthesis.

2: TEE NATURE OF MAN

The world, according to a view that dates back to Democritus, is a
random mixture of atoms: chance created solid aggregations out of
endless atomic collisions, and man’s nature was formed, essentially,
by extraneous forces, likewise operating by necessity or chance. This
view contrasts with the religious intuition that man is the object of a
divine purpose: a rational soul with an eternity in which to realize
and*perfect his own development — ^whether that ends in non-being, as
with Buddhism, or in everlasting beatitude, as in the Christian doc-
trines. These latter beliefs perhaps over-magnify man’s self-sufficiency
and make him a terminal point in a too-limited process: but the first
view not merely demolishes the significance of human history but shuts
its eyes to the evidence of order and purpose that even physical nature
presents. Let us aim at a fuller and juster statement.

Before every attempt to describe the world and life and time there
stands an unspoken prologue: human history itself. Without that pro-
logue, the rest of the play would be an unintelligible buzz and blur.
Neither history nor nature is given directly in contemporary experi-
ence, except in snatches that would be meaningless if they were not
part of a long sequence of interpretations to which man has given his
days and years. Each generation, each individual, can make but a
minute sampling of the whole in its effort to reduce to intelligible order
the collective experience upon which both knowledge and practice rest.
What we know of the world comes to us mainly by interpretation, not
by direct experience; and the very vehicle of interpretation itself is
a product of that which must be explained: it implies man’s organs
and physiological aptitudes, his feelings and curiosities and sociabil-
ities, his organized social relations and his means for transmitting and
perfecting that imique agent of interpretation, language. History itself
would remain indecipherable without the meanings and. values that
have emerged from it.

Man’s basic data are not in the least simple or elemental: what is
basic is the highly complex structure of meanings and values produced
and transmitted in history. What man knows about the nature of the
physical universe is only a subordinate part of his own process of self-

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

discovery and self-revelation. In recent times, baffled by his own inner
state, tormented by insoluble problems. Western man was in fact driven
to postulate, almost as much for his peace of mind as for any more
practical purpose, a highly simplified order, from which most of his
own essential characteristics were excluded: a world free from desire
and feeling and dream, a world divorced from human purposes and
human hopes: a world in which mind was laid to sleep, in order to
operate more efficiently on the body. But the fact is that complexity,
contradictions, paradox, and mystery are original features of human
experience; whereas simplicity and clarity and order are extremely
sophisticated end-products. The classic scientific attempts to picture the
world, from Thales onward, confuse conceptual simplicity with the
primitive and basic.

When we take into account the unspoken prologue of human history
we must demolish this misleading elementalism. Not sense data or
atoms or electrons or packets of energy, but purposes, interests, and
meanings, constitute the underlying facts of human experience. These
values rise out of impenetrable historic depths, like a coral reef, by
the heaping up of layer upon layer of life, with each visible event
emerging out of a million events that have left their historic deposit
and out of countless millions of lives that have never quite passed away.
Whatever man knows about external nature is a by-product of man’s
culture, as revealed in history; and the dimensions of nature alter with
every change in man’s own development: our present views of the uni-
verse are no more ultimate than the cave man’s. On every page of na-
ture’s opened book, man scrawls in the margin his own autobiography.

To understand the nature of man, accordingly, we must first of all
understand this prologue; that is, we must take man as we now find
him, in all his historic complexity: no bare animal shivering in his
skin, groping in the dark, clawing for food, an alien in a hostile land,
surrounded by enemies. Quite the contrary: we find man a creature
born into a going society, which provides him with clothes, protects
him from dangers, shelters him against the elements, offers him food,
supplies him with speech, surrounds him with some degree of love,
endows him with a score of gifts before he has even left the cradle.
Starting out in such a world, we discover that friendliness and un-
friendliness, good and bad, are more primordial elements of human
experience than matter or motion. Tenderness appeared in man’s mam-
malian ancestors eons before he learned to preserve fire or shape a
stone.

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

Human life, in its historic manifoldness and purposefulness, is our
starting point. No single being can embrace that life; no single lifetime
contains it; no single culture can encompass all its potentialities. One
cannot even partly understand the nature of man, unless one realizes
that its roots lie buried in the debris of countless invisible lives and
that its topmost branches must by their very frailty defy the most dar-
ing climber. Man lives in history; he lives through history; and in a
certain sense, he lives for history, since no small part of his activities
goes toward preparation for an undisclosed future. Without animal
faith in the past that he helped to make and in the future he is still
making, human life would shrink in all its dimensions.

3: THE BACKGROUND OF LIFE

In his own person, man represents every aspect of the cosmos. Re-
duced to his lowest terms, he is a lump of carbon and a puddle of
water, mixed with a handful of equally common metals, minerals, and
gases. But man is likewise a unit of organic life; he is a member of
the animal world, and of a special order of the animal world, the
vertebrates, with capacity for free movements, for selective intercourse
with the environment, for specially canalized responses through a
highly developed nervous system. Still further, man belongs to the
family of warm-blooded animals, the mammals, whose females give
milk to their young and so form a close and tender partnership, often
fiercely protective, for the nurture of their offspring; and through his
own internal development, his whole life is suffused with emotions and
erotic responses which have persisted, like so many other traits of do-
mestication — ^the cow’s milk or the hen’s eggs — in exaggerated form.
Starting as an animal among the animals, man has stretched and in-
tensified certain special organic capacities in order to develop more
fully what is specifically human. In a fashion that has no rivals in
other species he thinks: he plays: he loves: he dreams.

Before dealing at length with that part of man’s heritage which ac-
counts for his special creativeness let us examine for a moment the
traits and propensities he shares with the whole world of life. Given
the waters, rocks, soil, and solar energy out of which life originally
emerged, one is struck at once by the immense fecundity of all living
beings, the inexhaustible creativeness of nature herself.

Long before mind became dominant, life gave itself over to the end-
less magic of metamorphosis: its own self-transformation. To create

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

scales or feathers or skin or fur, to transform a fin into an arm or a
wing, to invent breathing apparatus for warm-blooded animals, ven-
turing the radical experiment of living entirely out of water, to separate
the cycles of growth and reproduction, as in the fern, to mimic leaves
or twigs or more poisonous creatures — for countless eons these efforts
sufficed to absorb the vital energies of every species.

Along with the most prudent kinds of adaptation go many other fac-
tors, not accounted for in terms of our dominant utilitarian ideology:
sheer riotousness of imagination — sometimes verging on the comic —
seems as common in nature as in human culture. By the very wealth
and diversity of forms, life assured its own continuity and extension
over every part of the planet: so that there is scarcely a depth of the
sea or a height of mountain top to which life, in some form, has not
penetrated.

This exuberance of life, this audacious inventiveness, cannot be
reduced to an endless series of accidents, Reading nature’s story, we
observe organic equivalents of what, in human terms, we should call
plan and plot. When “coincidences” multiply far beyond the bounds
of probability one must call the result “purpose,” and suspect that it
shows likenesses with similar processes and patterns man discovers in
his own life.

Every beginner in biology quickly learns the elementary properties
of organisms: nutrition, growth, reproduction, repair, and so forth;
but there are certain other attributes of life that must not be taken for
granted. First of all, all organisms follow a life-plan peculiar to their
species. Until death, the most radical changes that take place within
an organism proceed in a directed orderly sequence, determined partly
by its own nature: life-time is not reversible, nor is life itself a suc-
cession of random responses to an overpowering environment. Whereas
one may identify an inorganic element by its phase, one must identify
a higher organism not merely by its species and sex, but by its age,
its stage of maturation, its plan of life, its partnerships and ecological
associations.

One constant effort of the organism is to regulate the processes out-
side it, so that they come in the right succession as well as in the right
quantities. “To everything,” as The Preacher put it, “there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a
time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck that which is planted:
a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to
build up.”

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

The fact that each species has a norm of growth, that successive
stages in life are accompanied by the maturation and perfection of
related organs, culminating usually in reproduction, is a specific qual-
ity of life. Life is self-limited in time and space; and each species has
its own specific norm of growth, with a small margin of free play on
either side of the line. In the physical world, considered apart from
what man has made of it, there are no such regulations of quantity and
no such definitive life-plan — though, according to astro-physicists,
there may conceivably be some regular succession in the building up
of the elements in cosmic evolution.

The maintenance of an underlying identity through all the processes
of change, and the continued transformation of forms and functions
in the passage from conception to death, are among the essential attri-
butes of higher organisms. Continuity and emergence greet one every-
where. The shape of any living thing depends not merely upon outside
pressure but upon inner, self-maintaining, self-restoring, and self-ful-
filling processes. The blow of a hammer will leave a dent on a piece
of lead; if the solid lump is melted, the liquid, on cooling, will show
no trace of its original dent. But a blow on a living organism is not
taken so passively, nor will it vanish at all, except from consciousness:
the body at once mobilizes itself to take care of the injury, in a deter-
mined effort to restore its original stale. Even when the effect of the
blow has been repaired and the organism recovers its equilibrium, the
blow will leave behind an impression, sometimes twofold — visibly,
say, in the form of a scar, mentally as a memory.

This quality of preserving its identity and retaining impressions
begins at the organic level and has in man been carried into an extra-
sensory apparatus of culture. Organic experience is both cumulative
and anticipatory. The organism enregisters and remembers: it remem-
bers and reacts: it reacts and it anticipates: yes, it proposes and pro-
jects, All living behavior, even when seemingly blind, is forward-look-
ing: without instructions or past observations a cat who is about to have
kittens looks for a proper nest — a drawer of silk underwear will do —
to receive her offspring. That will stand for a thousand other similar
modes of anxiety and providential anticipation over what is still to
come. No organism can be adequately described in terms of its imme-
diate functions or its momentarily visible structure: above all, not man.

There are two other characteristics of organic life that must be
reckoned with, as essential to a fuller understanding of man’s creative
make-up. One of these is common in some degree to ail protoplasm,

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

and is generally called irritability, but may, in a larger sense, be
called responsiveness: a tendency to react to inner or outer stimuli
by contraction, expansion, withdrawal, attack, by submission or pro-
tection, by lying low or coming forth to do battle. The other charac-
teristic peculiar to life is the effort to maintain a dynamic equilibrium,
balancing accounts between daily profits and losses, making good
temporary deficits, putting aside reserves for use against an unex-
pected demand. At the lowest level, an alteration in the acid-alkaline
balance in the blood leads to both internal changes and external ad-
justments. Long ago Claude Bernard pointed out that the sensitive
maintenance of equable internal conditions was extremely important
for man’s higher development, since gross internal variations under-
mined, first of all, not the heart action or the muscles, but the ability
to ‘‘‘concentrate, to think logically, to pay attention.”

So far as man is an animal, then, he shares these characteristics of
the organic world. But living forms, in their emergence from the life-
less and non-organic, still retain some of the inertia of matter: the
temporary raising of the level of energy calls for continuous ef-
fort. There is indeed a sort of dialectic opposition, throughout all crea-
tion, between the tendency to fall into a state of stability and immo-
bility, and the tendency to climb upward, to seize more energy than is
needed for survival, taking risks, making adventurous leaps, placing
the flag of life on some higher mountain top, before seeking safety once
more — eventually death — in the valley below. However independent
man may seem through his own proud intelligence and its creations,
he still needs at every moment the constant co-operation of all the
forces of nature and history, in order to hold his own. Without food
man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more
than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but
without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time.

The same vital impetus that flows through all nature flows through
man and carries him onward: the forward movement of life, its in-
surgence and its expectancy, cannot be left out of any account of
man’s deepest nature. When he is disheartened and defeated by some
immediate setback to his own plan of life, an inner voice still whis-
pers; “Hold fast! Life is on your side; and in time you or your issue
will continue your development and overcome the obstacles that now
hold you back.” Reason often has told man he was defeated : why
should the prisoner, the slave, the corrupted and the deformed and
the ailing all go on with so few exceptions to their dismal end? For

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

even the healthy and the fortunate, does not death lie in wait, to can-
cel out each individual gain? Fortunately, the total effort of life in
the past still wells through every living creature; and a sense of life-
lo-come — projected as heaven and eternity in the older forms of reli-
gion — still beckons man on. Here the tritest of proverbs utters the
profoundest of truths; while there is life there is hope; and, one may
add, while there is hope there is life.

Even when man surpasses his animal needs, he starts from the
point where they leave off' or become insufficient, and if sometimes he
relapses into organic lethargy, his original impetus toward mind and
love comes from that source too. In his blood, the salt of the original
oceans in which life took rise still circulates; in the period of ovula-
tion the lunar month repeats its cycle; in the noblest acts of self-
sacrifice and love, he widens for the good of his race the impulse his
animal ancestors achieved, even as far hack as the fish, in their care
of the young. I have seen that shy fish, the lake bass, attack with his
teeth an intruder who stumbled near the nest he was guarding: as a
father I understood his feelings and withdrew. The duties of parent-
hood were not discovered yesterday.

To recapitulate. Life, even at the lowest level, is a selective proc-
ess: a process of choosing, restraining, promoting, taking from the
environment just such sustenance as is helpful toward the creature’s
development, rejecting what is irrelevant. But life does not float on a
timeless ocean of existence: it moves forward, impelled by an imma-
nent purpose that in man becomes a conscious one. Every act of growth
brings about a temporary upset in an organism’s equilibrium; and the
final phase of an organism’s existence, death, marks the presence of a
radical unbalance. Life is directional in tendency, goal-seeking, end-
achieving, in short, purposive. But unlike inanimate matter, it brings
into its present effort the memory of a past and the anticipation of a
future: by that enlargement of the field of its operations it opens up
the sphere of freedom.

The life-maintaining functions tend toward autonomy or self-direc-
tion. Nature’s injunction to every organism, speaking mythically, is:
“^Be yourself. Fulfill yourself! Follow your destiny!” Within the lim-
its of time and chance and necessitous circumstance, every organism
seeks to be master of its own fate. What Patrick Geddes called the
insurgent quality of life^ its capacity for initiating new activities and
going off in unexpected directions in order to overcome its inner limi-

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

tations and external handicaps is almost as characteristic as the more
tangible attribute of motility.

There is one final characteristic of organisms that enters into every
higher form: the more developed a creature is, the more independent
it seems, the more heavily does it rely upon the companionship and
support of many other species. Life has flourished only by extending
the area of mutual aid, reciprocal interplay, or symbiosis: every crea-
ture, voluntarily or blindly, is in an active give-and-take relationship,
not merely with its bare physical environment, but with a multitude
of other organisms. Living organisms, by the most complex and far-
reaching operations, form food-chains and work-chains that extend
from the bacteria in the soil and the air to the domesticated animals,
indeed they constantly co-operate to remake the whole environment for
the benefit of life. Even the most solitary and carnivorous eagle forms
a link in a living chain and depends for his own life on the prosperity
of his eventual victims.

Just as purpose in the human sense exists at a much lower uncon-
scious stage as '‘function” and ‘^mechanism” so does love, in the hu-
man sense, exist at a lower level as mutual aid and ecological partner-
ship. Thus life maintains not merely an internal dynamic balance,
so well described by Dr Walter Cannon in The Wisdom of the Body:
it also maintains an equally dynamic external balance between all
its constituent species, whose members live by acts of co-operation that,
in the higher organisms, are called self-restraint and self-sacrifice.
This is the fundamental morality of nature. Wherever this morality
breaks down and creates an unbalance between the species that need
one another or the men that need one another there is disintegration
and disorganization. Even the absence of some inorganic element in
this organic fabric of inter-relationship — as in a diet deficient in iron
— may be sufficient to place life in danger.

Balance: autonomy: symbiosis: directional development — ^these are
the fundamental concepts we extract from a study of living organisms
at a pre-human level and apply further toward the understanding and
development of man’s life and destiny in society. Where these fea-
tures are lacking, where life has become purposeless and unbalanced,
we have reason to suspect that a profound miscarriage has taken place.

The relative complexity of man’s external environment is matched
by his internal environment; and here, if one may judge on the basis
of his overt actions and fabrications, his departure from the norm of
his biological companions is most marked; for though they share in

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

the development of his higher nervous system, up to a point, they are
held to the needs of survival by a shorter rope than man has con-
trived. Plainly, man is full of self -begotten urges, desires, interests,
dreams, that have no visible and immediate relation to his biological
prosperity. Unlike the animaFs nicely adjusted reflexes, man’s propen-
sity to delay his responses and play with alternative modes of action
sometimes brings about fruitless expenditures of energy and miscar-
riages of effort; but fortunately, out. of this very propensity to ex-
ceed his animal limitations, to defy common sense and security, man
has found new sources of creativeness. Man can through his adapt-
ability survive in a crowded slum or a filthy trench, under conditions
that would sicken many other creatures; but he is also capable of
imagining and creating temples, palaces, gardens, houses, cities, which
give him pleasures derived from orderly form and accomplished de-
sign. By a similar process he has created an endless variety of forms
and patterns for social life.

On the basis of this organic existence the human personality emerges
out of the matrix of communal functions and activities; and with it
certain conditions, essenfial to all life, become intensified and height-
ened; for in man there is a sharpening of sensory equipment, a sensi-
tizing of emotional reactions and feelings, a finer capacity to assimilate
and recall events, even single experiences, an ability to project or-
ganic functions into extra-organic forms, a capacity to transfer experi-
ence into symbols and symbols into experience.

Now in a world only partly under its control, life always exists
on a precarious basis, holding on from moment to moment, ever wake-
ful, ever anxious, since security and safety may, by their very pres-
ence, asphyxiate the sentinels on duty and bring about disintegration
or death. For the individual member of a species, life is limited, con-
tingent, perilous, and in the final measure, brief. In the highest realm
of all — ^the realm of personality — life is even more delicately poised
over the abyss of non-existence than it is on the organic level: for
the balance is harder to maintain, and the very habits and rituals that
help to conserve life in the human community may, by their prolonga-
tion, also undermine it. A blessing repeated once too often becomes
a curse. Organic growth and repair have their counterpart in the per-
sonality in the process of renewal: a continued making over of ideas
and attitudes, of sentiments and plans, so that the person will over-
come the animal tendency to repetition, fixation, automatism.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

4: ECONOMY OF THE SUPERFLUOUS

From the very beginning-, it would appear, man has usually had a
margin of energy not devoted wholly to the struggle for survival This
margin, observable in the most primitive culture, is also visible in man’s
physiological organization; and its existence there offers a key to no
small part of his eventual creativity. Evolution itself, indeed, presumes
that there are capacities and potentialities latent in life itself, in its
most primitive manifestations, that impelled the organism to exert it-
self beyond the measure necessary to maintain itself or its species:
how otherwise in fact could purposeful, directional change, with all
the hazards and fatalities of untried experiments, come to characterize
tlie complex world of living organisms?

Because of the impact of economic life on human thought during
the last century, this margin has often been overlooked or misinter-
preted: so long as man was viewed as a mere bundle of adaptive mech-
anisms, as narrowly contrived for work as a mechanical loom or a
locomotive, his true character was overlooked. Nature, however, has
gone about its work with a freer hand than man; it has patently not
Ijcen so intent on the single goal of economy and efficiency. Not that
economy is necessarily lacking in nature’s plans: the grasses and
grains form seeds, for example, with conspicuous economy; but it
was an artist, rather than a mechanical engineer, who designed the
orchid or the flowering magnolia: even the pitcher plant could have
enticed its customers without presenting such an alluring show-window.
The exuberance of life . . . exuberance and largess — these make all
our rational standards of economy seem mean and restrictive.

In general, we may say that growth and development themselves
represent the margin all creatures have, in the upward curve of their
life, above the energy needed for bare survival; and in man’s organs
the role of superfluity is particularly conspicuous: Dr Walter Cannon
pointed out that many organs of the body, as well as the body con-
sidered as a whole, have a ‘"factor of safety” far above normal re-
quirements. Thus most of the functions of the paired organs, like
the lungs and kidneys, can be carried on quite effectively by single
ones; and even a small part of the adrenal glands or the pancreas en-
sures life, while their complete extirpation causes death. Perhaps the
greatest largess, the most luxuriant overgrowth of all, however, has
taken place in the brain; Morley Roberts went so far as to call it

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

tumorous. Comparative embryological studies, as Coghill points out,
indicate that the higher the animal in the order of intelligence, the
more the general overgrowth, as regards the immediate possibility
of behavior, involves the conditioning mechanism. . . . ‘‘This means
that in man at a stage of development when body movements are of
the simplest order, that part of the mechanism of association which
deals particularly with the highest mental and moral processes not
only is relatively massive but has definitely begun to organize itself
into the mechanical pattern that characterizes it in the adult.”

This organic efflorescence was of critical importance to man: prob-
ably it is the foundation of all those playful impulses, those self-
starting activities, those circuitous explorations and long-continued
elaborations, which differentiate human behavior from the brutal di-
rectness of other animals — ^though even at lower levels, as in the nest-
adorning habits of the bower bird, there may exist some faint early
extra-organic premonition of this new order of activity. The quality
we call playfulness depends upon an excess of energy: in the young
it comes forth, at a physiological level, as random cries, gurglings,
babblings, bubble-blowings, movements of arms and legs, closing and
opening of hands — quite apart from any promptings of hunger, dis-
comfort, or a friendly presence. Let these energies be dissipated in a
fever, and the child’s body immediately becomes droopy, inert, death-
like. At a later stage of growth, idle associations, superfluous images,
involved dreams, random explorations, play a part in development
that could never be justified, in origin, on any principle of economy
or by any direct expectation of usefulness. In a mechanistic culture
like our own, these important activities have been either undervalued
or overlooked,

Once we rid ourselves of the unconscious bias of mechanism, we
must recognize that the “superfluous” is just as essential to human
development as the economic: that beauty, for example, has played
as large a part in evolution as use and cannot be explained, as Darwin
sought to, merely as a practical device of courtship or fertilization.
In short, it is just as permissible to conceive nature, mythologically, as
a poet, working in metaphors and rhythms, as to think of nature as a
cunning mechanic, trying to save material, make both ends meet, do
the job efficiently and cheaply. The mechanistic interpretation is quite
as subjective as the poetic one; and up to a point each is useful.

The species that have continued the upward climb, notably man
himself, are the relatively imperfect, unspecialized, uncommitted, self-

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

willed, and even maladjusted ones. These species reject Spencer’s one-
sided passive definition of life, as ^‘the continuous adjustment of in-
ternal relations to external ones”; they stubbornly seek to reverse this
process, in order to bring external relations into harmony with their
own life-plans. Man dominates the line of the brainy animals; and
the over-development of the brain itself, with its thousands of still un-
used neurones, was the most critical step, possibly, in the emergence
of manlike slocks. In man this change was probably accompanied by
the expansion of the role of feelings already developed in the mam-
malian line. These further intensifications of feeling, which went with
the increase of intelligence and modified it, were due, possibly, to
die direct hormonic action of monthly ovulation and the prolonged
activity of the mammary glands of the female and the overactive geni-
tals of the male.

All the threats of arrested development, the threat of complete
adaptation, the threat of parasitism, the threat of insensibility, were
diminished or overcome by the development of organs that increased
the range, vividness, and autonomy of human responses. Through the
overgrowth of his brain, man had an agent capable of carrying creative-
ness from the organic realm, where it could only be slowly embodied
in relatively stable animal structure to the super-oi’ganic realm, the
specific domain of human culture. Instead of carving one’s answer in
flesh and blood, one could write the answer on the sand and erase it
the next day, or perpetuate it in wood and stone, on papyrus or paper.
Man is the unfinished animal. Unlike other organisms, the final stage
of his growth is not determined by his biological past: it rests with
himself and is partly determined by his own plans for the future.

With that change to the super-organic, the first age of man properly
began. Very possibly, in the difficult days of the later glacial periods,
this change had survival value, too: but that must be taken as an
incidental gratuity. In the end, man paid for his creative exuberance
by his increased consciousness of death; yet in facing death, he added
a new dimension to his life, which no other animal, apparently, has
even dimly sensed.

S: SOCIAL DISCOVERY AND FABRICATION

The human community, as Aristotle observed, is an association of
people who need each other. And they need each other for two reasons:
spiritually in order to find themselves in the full dimensions of the

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

group: practically to take advantage of their differences. Unfortu-
nately by perfecting their special aptitudes they become more help-
less as they become mo;e efficient, unless they constantly interchange
their goods, their services, and above all their understanding. Had
men remained as like unto one another as ox is to ox, men would have
discovered only a small fragment of the potentialities of Man. No
amount of inner probing could bring out the immense wealth of hu-
man nature: to find himself man had as it were to divide himself into
a thousand strands or skeins, each one of which would isolate some
special aptitude and interest, carrying it further, intensifying its qual-
ity by joining it to a similar aptitude or interest. It was through the
social division of labor — a further transference to culture of the orig-
inal division of labor between the sexes — that man unearthed many
obscure inchoate capacities and brought them to perfection.

The old saying, that it takes nine tailors to make a man, is far too
modest: it takes not merely many tailors but all the professions, all
the vocations, all the castes and classes and families, all the primary
communities and purposive associations to make a man. All men are,
in some sense, fractional and incomplete: a complete man would have
to incarnate a whole society. ‘*Man” in that sense is purely a figment,
for he would have to encompass future achievements as well as past
ones. Thus human society, unlike animal societies, is an agency of
self-consciousness and self-exploration and self-revelation. Man does
not merely exist as an organic product: he makes something of him-
self, and the making of man is the meaning of history.

Had this process of self-transformation remained a purely biological
one it would no doubt have been extremely slow and limited in all its
possibilities. Suppose, for example, man had concentrated upon in-
creasing his individual working capacity so little as two horsepower;
along that line, he might have taken half a million years to effect, by
selective breeding or otherwise, this tremendous change in his muscu-
lar capacity. And when he had done so, he would probably have been
much nearer to a glorified gorilla than to his present self, thereby
losing various other highly valuable attributes, like sensitivity, flexi-
bility, mobility, intelligence, by the way.

By creating an extra-biological mode of inheritance, his “culture”
or social heritage, man was able to produce extra horsepower first by
his domestication of horses, and then, many times his original work-
ing capacity by inventing machines, without altering a single organ of
his body. Witii his transmitted skill in making tools and machines,

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

and passing on knowledge by symbolic means, man has created wind-
mills, water mills, steam engines, transformers, atomic piles, in the
short space of two thousand years: these instruments meet man’s utmost
needs for power far better than any conceivable organic adaptation.

Essentially, a culture is an extra-organic means of changing man’s
nature and his environment, without leaving indelible marks on his
organism or curtailing his essential flexibility and plasticity. A heated
house for winter living is the equivalent of the horse’s trick of ac-
quiring a shaggT" winter coat of hair: an X-ray tube is the equivalent
of acquiring a more penetrating form of vision — and so on. For thou-
sands of years man’s non-material culture, mainly verbal, esthetic,
and ritualistic, outpaced his technical culture. His habit of projection,
symbolization, detachment, has enabled man to make many experi-
ments whose bad results, if encountered in organic form, would have
been fatal to the species. At the same time, it has given a certain dura-
bility to insights and discoveries that would otherwise have vanished,
perhaps, with the moment or the individual that produced them.

Wliat Leibnitz said about the nature of the world itself, that it pro-
vided the maximum amount of freedom compatible with order, might
be said even more truly of human culture. By means of his culture,
man transforms his environment, attaches new values to natural proc-
esses, projects his own purposes on natural functions, and eventually
fabricates a whole succession of new selves, interacting in highly in-
dividualized communities, without committing himself irremediably
to any single way of life or any single type of personality.

Every human group, every human being, lives within a cultural
matrix that is both immediate and remote, visible and invisible: and
one of the most important statements one can make about man’s pres-
ent is how much of the past or the future it contains. Since culture
must be extraneous, or at least detachable, to be transmitted — ^though
the detachment may take the form of a remembered precept, trans-
mitted by word of mouth, or a motor reaction, like bowing, passed on
by direct imitation — even the most immaterial form of culture never-
theless has a physical aspect which cannot be wholly ignored, while
every physical event that comes within human range has a symbolic
aspect, which must be interpreted.

Without interpretation, there would be no distinction between a peas-
ant s partaking of bread and wine at an inn and his having bread and
wine in Holy Communion at Church. As physiological performances,
both acts are the same: in meaning, value, and purpose, they are as

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

distinct as vegetarianism and cannibalism. In the organic view of
human development, any part of man’s life or his environment may
become an active element in his culture; and so of himself. By the
same token, any part of himself may become operative in the external
world: no single aspect of either personality or culture has any under-
standable existence except in terms of the total life in which it shares.
^"Mind and matter, soil, climate, flora, fauna, thought, language, and
institutions [are] aspects of a single rounded whole, one total growth.”
That perception of Charles Horton Cooley’s is fundamental to an un-
derstanding of the nature of man. Nature is nature as brought forth
and interpreted by man’s culture; and culture even in its most evanes-
cent and ethereal aspects is still the culture of nature: the energies
and vitalities man finds himself endowed with and supported by.
Each is inconceivable except in terms of the other.

Man lives and learns by many devices; but the most important of
all his adaptations, the one’ that differentiates him from the brutes and
has given him a large measure of dominance over nature, is man’s
capacity for symbolic interpretation. That is not merely a key to
knowledge and a key to self-fabrication: it is also a key to man’s
activities and actions. Karl Marx quarreled with idealism and older
forms of materialism because they were content merely to interpret
the world: whereas he understood that thought, being a process of life,
must also help transform the world. But he overlooked, in his polemic,
the extent to which interpretation itself produces change: primarily
by transforming the potentialities of the interpreter.

6: THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE

The growth of conscious purpose and self-direction — all that is im-
plied in the historic concepts of the soul and the person — was made
possible by man’s special skill in interpreting his own nature and
working his experiences into a meaningful and valuable whole, upon
which he could draw for future actions and operations. That skill rests
upon a special aptitude, embedded in man’s very physiology : the abil-
ity to form and transmit symbols. Man’s most characteristic social trait,
his possession of an extra-organic environment and a super-organic
self, which he transmits from generation to generation without using
the biological mechanism of heredity, is dependent upon his earlier
conquest of the word.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

During the last century this essential fact about man’s nature has
been obscured by the false assumption that man is primarily a “tool-
using animal.” Carlyle called him tliat long before Bergson suggested
that the term Homo Faber, Man the Maker, should replace Homo
Sapiens. But man is not essentially distinguished from his animal rela-
tives either by the fact that he lives in groups or performs physical
work with tools. Man is first and foremost the self -fabricating animal:
the only creature who has not rested content with his biological form
or with the dumb repetitions of his animal role. The chief source of
this particular form of creativity was not fire, tools, weapons, ma-
chines, but two subjective instruments far older than any of these: the
dream and the word.

Without dwelling on the function of symbolization, one cannot begin
to describe the nature of man or plumb the deepest spring of his
creativeness. That is why I pass over many other attributes, fully taken
into account today by anthropology and psychology, to dwell on man’s
role as interpreter. Language, the greatest of all human inventions, is
the most essential key to the truly human. When words fail him, as
we find in the few authenticated cases of wild children reared without
the benefit of human society, man is an animal without a specific life-
plan, compelled to imitate the wolfish habits of the animal in whose
brood he has been suckled and reared.

One can, of course, only speculate on the way in which man in-
vented and perfected the various tools of symbolization. But in the pri-
mary instance of speech, the word was made possible by changes in
the bodily organs including the larynx, the tongue, the teeth, and not
least the creation of mobile lips: in the earliest skulls identifiable as
man, the anatomists find the speech centers already relatively well de-
veloped. The enlargement of man’s powers, through his quicker abil-
ity to learn by trial and correction, demanded a special instrument
for dealing with the multitude of sensations and meanings, suggestions
and demands, that impinged upon him. Every sensation, as Adelbert
Ames has experimentally demonstrated, is a prognostic directive to
action: hence even the simplest stimulus must be interpreted, for
whether we accept it or reject it depends not only upon its own nature
but upon our purposes and predispositions and proposals. Even the
purest sensation mml be translated and re-ordered, before the organ-
ism will in fact see it, hear it, or answer it. In that response, the en-
tire organism co-operates; and what is actually seen or heard or felt

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

is only whaf makes sense in terms of the organism’s immediate pur-
pose or its historic plan of development.

At every moment of his waking existence, man senses, interprets,
proposes, acts in a single unified response: but between the starting
point and the end, the intermediate steps of interpretation and planful
reorganization are critical, for it is here that error, miscalculation,
and frustration may intervene. With the development of language,
man created an instrument of interpretation that gave him a way of
traversing the largest possible field of life. What he took in of the
world expressed his own nature: what he expressed of himself par-
took of the nature of the world; for it is only in thought that organism
and environment can be separated.

Now other creatures than man respond to immediate signals: the
snarl of a dog has meaning for another dog, and the upraised white
tail of a doe tells the fawns, as plainly as words, “Follow me!” But
man, at a critical moment in his development, began to invent signs,
in the form of audible words, which represent an event or a situation
even when they are not present. By this act of detachment and ab-
straction, man gained the power of dealing with the non-present, the
unseen, the remote, and the internal: not merely his visible lair and
his daily companions, but his ancestors and his descendants and the
sun and the moon and the stars: eventually the concepts of eternity
and infinity, of electron and universe: he reduced a thousand potential
occasions in all their variety and flux to a single symbol that indi-
cated what was common to all of them.

Similarly, by kindred means, man was able to give form to and
project his inner world, otherwise hidden and private: by words,
images, related sounds, it became part of the public world, and thus
an “object.” This extraordinary labor-saving device, for extracting,
condensing, and preserving the most complicated kinds of events, was
perhaps another manifestation of the creative uses of his exuberance
and vital proliferation. Man’s possession of a “useless instrument,”
his special voice-producing organs, with their wide range of tones,
plus a love of repetition, which one observes in the fullest degree in
infants, opened up playful possibilities. If man is an inventor or an
artist, the first object of his interest is his own body: he falls in love
with his own organs long before he seeks to master the outside world.

“We must never forget,” the distinguished philologist Jespersen once
observed, “that the organs of speech ... are one of mankind’s most
treasured toys, and that not only children but also grown people in

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

civilized as well as savage communities, find amusement in letting
their vocal cords and tongue and lips play all sorts of games.” Out
of this original organic overflow, man found too a way to shape a
meaningful, orderly world: the world realized in language, music,
poesy, and directed thought. The gift of tongues is the greatest of all
gifts: in the beginning was the Word.

Speech, human speech, aflfected a miraculous transformation in
human society: by such magic Prospero tamed Caliban and released
Ariel. Speech, at first probably inseparable from gesture, exclama-
tory, disjointed, structureless, purely emotive, laid the foundation for
a more complex mechanism of abstractions, the independent structure
of language itself; and with language, human culture as an extra-
organic activity, no longer wholly dependent upon the stability and
continuity o-f the physical body and its daily environment, became
possible. This broke through the boundaries of time and place that
limit animal associations.

In the behavior of that perpetual primitive, the human infant, we
can follow the original transition from babble to the involuntary re-
production of facial movements, from private gurglings for self-satis-
faction to public demands in which a particular tone will be evoked
to bring forth a particular response from the mother: the offer of a
breast, the production of a dry diaper, the removal of a pricking pin,
the reassurance of human companionship. Much of the intercourse
between mother and child is the expression, on both sides, of feeling:
tenderness, joy, rage, anxiety. Beyond doubt, the introjectidn and pro-
jection of feeling were basic to the whole achievement of language:
a point often overlooked by pragmatic or rationalist interpretations.

In the instances of wild children nurtured by animals, we can verify
this interpretation: for the ability to form words seems to disappear
altogether when the infant’s earliest vocalizings are not encouraged
by similar vocalizing on the part of those who look after him. With
the loss of language man also loses the facility for more complex
forms of human behavior: though some of his organic capacities be-
come intensified to animal sharpness, in an extra-sensitive nose or in
muscular endurance, the veritably human touch remains absent: above
all, the wild child forfeits the capacity to understand or communicate
human feeling, thus becoming inferioi, not only to other human be-
ings, but to the dog or cat, who have had the benefit of human asso-
ciation, and who have learned the gestures and tones by which human
feelings are expressed. Negatively, there is still another way of imder-

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

standing the specifically human role of language: for psychologists
have found that deaf-mutism, even when combated with skillful care,
is a greater handicap to intelligence than blindness. Speech, even
though accompanied by blindness, opens the path of social co-op-
eration.

In his attempt to associate intelligence with the special faculty for
dealing with the geometrical, the mechanical, the non-living, Henri
Bergson curiously underestimated the formative effect of language
and over-stressed the part played by physical tools and mechanical
aptitudes, for he perversely interpreted speech as being lamed by
man’s rational preoccupation with static objects. On the contrary, lan-
guage developed far more rapidly and effectively than mechanical
tools ; and it was probably in origin primarily a means of representing
labile feelings and attitudes, the least geometrical part of man’s ex-
perience. The most important thing for a human being to know, from
infancy onward, is whether he is welcome or unwelcome, whether he
is being loved and cherished and protected or hated and feared; and
the give-and-take of speech, with all its modulations of color and tone,
provides these essential clues. Language was not invented by philoso-
phers seeking truth or by scientists seeking to understand the processes
of nature, nor yet by mechanics seeking to shape a more adequate
tool; nor was it created by methodical bookkeepers seeking to make
an inventory of the contents of the world. Language was the outcome
of man’s need to affirm solidarity with his own kind. Because it was
a prime organ, not only of social co-operation, but of sympathetic
and dramatic insight, it helped to control and direct all human be-
havior.

In time, no doubt, language lent itself to many other uses besides
communion and fellowship: it gave rise to a sense of “thatness” as
well as “we-ness” and furthered causal insight into processes and re-
lationships. Not least, language was a means whereby subjective reac-
tions became externalized, and objective facts became internalized:
thus it favored constant intercourse and traffic between the public world
and the private world. In every sense, then, speech was man’s prime
instrument for sharing his private world with his fellows and for
bringing the public world home to himself, though in time it was sup-
plemented by the symbols and significants of the other arts. He who
could speak the language could be trusted: every word was a pass-
word, indicating friend or foe, in-group or out-group; and these prac-
tices linger on in establishing identity right down to our own day.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

The practical and rational offices of language, which now seem to us
all-important, must for long have been purely incidental.

The complicated structure, the grammatical and logical subtlety,
and the immense variety of even primitive languages drive one to be-
lieve that a large part of man’s creative activity, perhaps for hun-
dreds of thousands of years, must have concerned itself almost ex-
clusively with the development of intelligible speech, and with second-
ary means of symbolization through the visual arts; for painting,
too, in the Aurignacian caves, shows an exquisite perfection that
argues a prolonged period of unremitting effort. No machine that man
invented before the twentieth century compares in complexity and re-
finement with the simplest of human languages. No wonder this super-
organic structure transformed the terms of man’s self-development.

Beavers can build dams: bees can construct efficient dwellings: the
meanest bird has still a surer mechanism for flying and landing than
man has yet achieved. But no other creature has come within sight of
man in the arts of symbolic communication. Mainly through language
man has created a second world, more durable and viable than the
immediate flux of experience, more rich in possibilities than the purely
material habitat of any other creature. By the same agent, he has re-
duced the vastness and overpowering multiplicity of his environment
to human dimensions: abstracting from its totality just so much as he
could handle and control. The very formal qualities of words served
as an instrument for understanding and directing the everlasting flow
of things: it is because the structure of language and logic is relatively
static (Parmenides and Plato) that the unceasing changes and proc-
esses of the natural world (Heraclitus) can be interpreted. If mean-
ings changed as quickly as events, no event would have a meaning.

Let us make no mistake then: language is far more basic than any
other kind of tool or machine. Through man’s overdeveloped fore-
brain and his overflowing sensory-emotional responses, he came into
contact with an ever-enlarging field of action; and through language,
he found an economic way of dealing with this complexity and turn-
ing every state and activity to the service of meaning. So essential is
language to man’s humanness, so deep a source is it of his own creativ-
ity, that it is by no means an accident in our time that those who have
tried to degrade man and enslave him have first debased and misused
language, arbitrarily turning meanings inside out. Civilization itself,
from the most primitive stage onward, moves toward the continuous
creation of a common social heritage, transcending all the peculiarities

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

of race and environment and historic accident, shared over ever wider
reaches of space and time. This heritage, apart from environmental
modifications, such as roads, canals, and cities, is transmitted largely
in symbolic form; and by far the greater part of its symbolization is
in spoken and written language. Contrary to the proverb, words make
a greater difference than sticks and stones: they are more durable, too.

7 : THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

In dwelling on the invention of speech, as the most universal form
of symbolism and the most weighty vehicle of communion and com-
munication, I have, for the sake of clearness, treated this form of sym-
bolism as if it stood alone. But as a matter of fact, the symbol plays
a much wider role in human life. From what we know of the present
nature of man, we must infer that the spontaneous babblings out of
which is shaped the word were accompanied by another primitive
and unlearned trait, likewise welling up through that capacious, over-
excitable organ, the brain: the habit of dreaming. Babble and dream
imagery are perhaps the raw stuff out of which man fashioned all his
symbols, and consequently, most of his ' meaningful life: music and
mathematics and machines: social patterns of behavior and the culture
of cities.

Civilized man tends to associate dreaming most definitely with
sleep: a sort of interior drama that goes on in the darkened theater
of consciousness. He is occasionally not a little abashed when he be-
comes aware of his own dream states in waking life, for they some-
times displace his immediate sense of the external world; but he slides
easily from the half-wakeful state of revery into the inner recesses
of sleep where the events he experiences often seem more realistic,
more gripping, more intense than any actual life provides. Indeed, in
certain cases he may live a dream progressively, from night to night,
and become a little confused as to which has the more dominant role
in his life — as in the famous instance of Chuan^-Chou who. dreamed
that he was a butterfly and then asked himself whether, in waking life,
he was not perhaps a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.

Even in the most highly organized and controlled personality, no
little part of the working day is spent in acting an interior drama with
snatches of dialogue and action surprisingly different from overt con-
duct: these spontaneous associations have many of the characteristics
of a dream, as James Thurber showed, with hardly more than a touch

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

of exaggeration, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In daydreams
mild men often become murderers and faithful husbands become liber-
tines: perhaps half the sins and crimes men commit come about be-
cause they pass too easily, without prudent reflection, from that inner
state to the public performance of their fantasy.

In childhood, perhaps even more in adolescence, daydreaming may
occupy the larger part of an individuaTs waking hours, rivaling night-
dreaming in its absorption and self -enclosure ; and very probably in
primitive man there was far less of a gap between waking conscious-
ness and sleeping consciousness than there now is. Against the cur-
rent tendency to over-value the externalized and the objective, John
Butler Yeats’ words are a fine corrective: . My theory is that we

are always dreaming — chairs, tables, women and children, our wives
and sweethearts, the people in the streets, all in various ways and with
various powers are the starting point of dreams. As we fall asleep
we drift away from the control and correction of facts into the world
of memory and hope. . . . Sleep is dreaming away from the facts
and wakefulness is dreaming in closer contact with the facts and since
facts excite our dreams and feed them, we get as close as possible to
the facts if we have the cunning and the genius of poignant feeling.”

In normal people, we think of the waking consciousness as being
more rational, more directed, more rigorous, more conventional, than
the imagined behavior that takes place in sleep: this is largely true.
But the life of early man was not so definitely organized into rational
and irrational compartments; and though a certain wakefulness and
alertness was necessary for his survival and would impose many prac-
tical limitations on his behavior, the dream may well have occupied
the greater part of his energies; and throughout much of his life fan-
tasy perhaps had the upper hand over common sense. ' Possibly the
primitive’s tendency to regard what we call insanity with respect, in-
deed, with awe and reverence, is a survival of this fact.

At all events, the notion that man’s days have been continually
spent in the hard "^struggle for existence” is probably only another
one of those subjective interpretations derived from the grim state of
life under nineteenth century industrialism. We do ill to transfer these
interests into the life of primitive man. In mechanical invention man
was for countless years almost an imbecile, as helpless as a baby ; and
after he had stayed his hunger, he did little to improve his general
situation: his practical devices, his technical adaptations, his improve-
ments of the environment were few and far between; indeed he was, on

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

the evidence, incapable of sustained labor and easily diverted from his
meager utilitarian pursuits except when hunger was pressing. All too
quickly the primitive settles back into a dreamful lethargy; and his
subjective world must often have loomed far larger than the visible
environment.

Plainly, we know no more about the origin of the dream than we
do of the origins of language. But we can speculate on the special
role of the dream, in order to find perhaps a faint clue to later devel-
opments. Given what we know of man’s organic equipment and present
traits and aptitudes, there is some reason to think that the dream had
two main sources. One was man’s extreme impressionability to both
externally and internally aroused stimuli, so that the bodily changes
which take place in fear, anger, and sexual passion, pouring their
hormones into his bloodstream, may well leave traces in the cortex
long after the immediate occasion has passed. The other source, aris-
ing out of that very impressionability, would be — especially for primi-
tive man — his constant anxiety. This anxiety was not solely of neu-
rotic origin. With good reason, fear has left a deep mark on the hu-
man race, for as man emerged from his animalhood, he had many
occasions, particularly at night, to be fearful. Until primitive man
had invented weapons and the means of organized social co-operation,
he was a relatively defenseless animal surviving only by his sharper
wits: he had hard work to hold his own among savage creatures that
had natural weapons: tusks, horns, teeth, coils, poisons, far superior
to anything in his own natural armory: some of them capable of work-
ing in close packs like the wolf, the bison, or the elephant.

With man’s highly evolved sensorium, the coming of darkness would
redouble all the fears of the day instead of quieting them. Here the
dream performed a special function: it maintained man’s persistent
state of anxious alertness, yet it alleviated it and counteracted it. In
the dream the power he lacked in reality would come back to him in
a highly magnified form: denied his prey in the hunt, he would seize
it in his dream; and though he might relive the fear he was forced
to suppress, he might also awaken from the dream — as many an in-
ventor has awakened since — ^with some new plan of action. Released
from the constraints of practical necessity, the dream freed man from
the fear-constricted routines and compulsive rituals on which his se-
curity had been built: it was the sphere of spontaneity and untram-
meled experiment. Much was possible in the dream that could not
penetrate through the walls of daytime habit. So the dream was both

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

a shock-absorber, cushioning man’s anxieties, and an uninhibited ex-
pression of his inner self, releasing him from dull constraints and
paralyzing compulsions.

Should we do man an injustice, then, to characterize him as essen-
tially the neurotic animal, subjected, in his earliest phases, to constant
hallucinations, like those that even highly rational people quickly de-
velop, for example, in the eerie darkness of a medium’s seance? We
say that a person is ‘‘out of his mind” when he has, in fact, withdrawn
completely into his mind; yet this over-valuation of the inner life may
have been, in the end, the chief source of man’s outer mastery. On
this hypothesis, man’s irrationality perhaps contributed as much to
his departures from animal conformity as his mother-wit: it was man’s
nervous apprehensions that gave hjs mind its peculiar bent and set: a
readiness to re-organize his sensory experience on the basis of more
perfect dream-images that conformed to inner desire as well as outer
necessity. In the dream his obsessions and fears, his desires and lusts,
but likewise his gropings and his aspirations beyond his brutish daily
existence, would take on new shapes, almost independent of his vo-
lition.

Escaping the restraints of practice, escaping also the inhibitions of
his strict social code, the dream served as an agent of creative detach-
ment. This special agent probably enabled man to surpass, not only
his more torpid animal competitors, but also his own matter-of-fact
self as it had been shaped to a degree by the conditions of organic
life and physical survival. Man is the only creature who lives a two-
fold life, partly in the external world, partly in the symbolic world he
has built up within it; and the dream vies with the word in emanci-
pating him from a constricted here and now. By means of the dream
man learned to think and act more daringly than other, more stable
creatures, better aware of their limitations and better adjusted to their
natural state.

More primitive, probably, than speech, dream imagery became the
source and foundation of many other symbolic activities; for every
man, while he is asleep, is an artist, creating shapes that his hand
may not yet know how to execute; and dream- work may be the earliest
form of work, in that it was perhaps the most simple way of re-
making the environment and re-organizing purposive activity. The in-
ventiveness and creativeness man displayed in the dream, first under
pressure of anxiety and then more freely, in response to need, may

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

be the main source of man’s more enduring activities in symboliza-
tion^ indeed in his own humanization.

In short, this rich spontaneous outflow of psychic material, a river
of varying shallows and depths by day, a seething, spreading flood by
night, gave man an extra means of reconstituting his life. For if sleep
itself detaches man from the bodily events of waking life, the dream
divorces him from all other conditions: it brings him out of his im-
mediate world, with its constant diSiculties, frustrations, and anxie-
ties, and shows him, in its more benign aspects, how the miseries of
life can be counterbalanced and overcome. To this end, the psyche
stows away material in the dark caverns of the unconscious, and de-
livers it up, in new combinations, for creatively recasting the future.
Because nothing is impossible in the dream, because nothing is in-
credible, the dream enlarges the domain of human potentialities: the
territory that is so reclaimed can in time be cultivated during the
waking life. The fact that dream-images normally recur with the
least relaxation of attention, the fact that they arrange themselves spon-
taneously into dramatic and often purposeful sequences, irrational per-
haps in content but creative, may well offer a master clue to the devel-
opment of human culture. Even the most disciplined and directed kind
of thought cannot do without the free associations of dream: Henri
Poincare, the mathematician, has reminded us of this fact. Hence a
failure to cultivate the inner life, a failure to do homage to the func- .
tion of dream or to permit its untrammeled exercise, may also explain
the lack of self-confidence and the imaginative paralysis that leads to
the death of a civilization. People in that state can conceive no alterna-
tive to their man-made catastrophes. They do not realize that the very
power of conceiving alternatives might block the fatal advent of dis-
aster.

Dream, hallucination, illusion — ^these are some of the means by
which man was able to overcome his fears and to compensate for his
inferiorities: at the moment he abandoned his animal securities and
lost his organic connections with nature, the dream magnified his own
image and restored his faith in himself. Admittedly, these self-begot-
ten images and symbols may muddy the few clear moments of man’s
daylight consciousness: even worse, man’s absorption in dream, pre-
cisely because it brings him so swiftly to his goal, may have long stood
in the way of his achieving that causal insight into non-personal na-
ture which science, first in ancient astronomy, came to reveal. There
is some reason to think that man’s exploitation and mastery of his

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

subjective medium may have even retarded his practical mastery of
the external environment: the wish that could be fulfilled in fantasy
seemed hardly worth the further trouble of working out in the more
refractory materials of wood and stone and fiber. This would suggest
that tnan’s late achievement of mechanical invention rested upon his
reluctance to suppress a good part of his dream life: Homo Faber,
the tool-user, could not in fact develop until he was willing to give
words and images an inferior role.

Though at the beginning man’s skill in using symbols was respon-
sible for emergence into a truly human state, in the end it sometimes
constituted a grave handicap: for he would apply subjective symbols
to matters where real mastery depended upon the use of objective
tools: fire and earthquake and rain and crop growth cannot be con-
trolled by runes and verbal formulae — though to a limited extent we
know certain diseases can. No small part of man’s rational develop-
ment consists in freeing himself from the misleading suggestions and
the devious commands of his own undirected dreaming. So retarding
was man’s dream consciousness, so easily did it lend itself to perver-
-siop, that Dr A. L, Kroeber has properly taken, as a definite indica-
tion of human progress, the transformation of the infantile irrationali-
ties of primitive man into the relatively mature rationalities of mod-
ern man.

But after all these allowances are made, we can see that without
the aid of dream and word mankind could never have escaped from
the animal world of the here and now. For there is still another func-
tion of the dream that must be taken into account: its prophetic or
anticipatory nature. The dream is an organ of man’s inchoate desires;
and no small part of these impulses must come to fruit in the future.
Freudian interpretation has over-stressed, perhaps, the deviousness of
the dream mechanism: its tortuous methods of concealing the impulses
that it expresses. There is in addition a much closer connection be-
tween need and dream-satisfaction which operates continually at al-
most every level of waking existence; for the dream often represents
the direct pressure of an unsatisfied impulse and points the way to an
appropriate goal or to a line of action: sometimes to future alterna-
tives of action. It is in the persistent recurrence of a particular hu-
man image during even his waking hours that a person may become
conscious suddenly of the fact that he or she has fallen in love: just
as an adolescent first becomes conscious of bodily changes through
the sudden onslaught of thinly disguised erotic images in dreams. Such

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

dream-images become dynamic promptings to future behavior: and
they further prepare the way for it by enabling the subject to enact
in fantasy the divergent possibilities that life presents. Psychodrama
is the essence of the dream. In the dream one acts alternative roles
and releases oneself from the momentum of the past and the steady
drive of habit: where in real life one’s practical intention may keep
one pushing along a narrow track, looking neither to one side nor the
other, in the dream one’s anima may give one wiser counsel; to accept
life in its wholeness and depth: above all, the life to come.

8: MAN AS INTERPRETER

Those who try to understand the nature of man mainly by empha-
sizing his continuities with other animal species, naturally neglect the
organs and agents that set him off from those species: hence they un-
derestimate his creativeness and originality. Their attitude is, no doubt,
partly a reaction against the ancient misuse of the symbolic functions:
the attempt to make words directly perform operations. In general
modern man over-values the act and undervalues the word: did not
Goethe himself, word-magician though he was, say: In the beginning
was the Deed?

Now language, as the vehicle of social solidarity, emotion, feeling,
and thought often produces potent results on other human beings: not
merely gross changes in behavior like those brought about via words,
in hypnosis and suggestion, but a large range of minor modifications,
every day and hour of our lives. To overlook this fact in the spiritual
economy of the organism is like overlooking breathing in its physi-
ology. It is the very success of symbolic functions in transforming the
attitudes and the behavior of other human beings that has tempted
man to misuse this magic: he has foolishly thought that it is possible
to apply verbal formulae to alter the behavior of physical bodies. If
the experiments of Dr Rhine and his colleagues in psycho-kinesis prove
correct, even this propensity may not rest on a complete hallucina-
tion; but it is obviously much easier to make one set of spots face
upward in dice by placing them in that position than by using an
extra-sensory factor to bring about this result: so man probably wasted
on word magic much valuable effort that might, long ago, have gone
into the invention of more appropriate methodology. Even the great
Roman physician Galen supplemented his natural knowledge with
spells and magic formulae.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

But man’s capacity for misusing verbalization is no reason for de-
valuing the function itself. The various contemporary reactions against
the full employment of language, from da-daism to logical positivism,
will not in the least save us from error and self-deception: they merely
substitute for the small detectable errors of misused speech the colossal
error of rejecting the greater part of man’s subjectivity, because it comes
to us primarily in symbols of a non-operational order: symbols that
have as many meanings as there are contexts and internal states. Mod-
ern man’s insulation against the poetic use of words as mere propa-
ganda — irrespective of whether the attempt to persuade is based on
truth or falsehood— can lead only to a general denial of the possi-
bilities of growth or transformation in the self, except by a purely
physiological process. But since medicine teaches us that there are
no purely physiological processes, no part of the body that is not in
some degree affected by mental states, that is, by images and symbols,
this self-imposed immunization and impoverishment is also a self-
deception. On this matter, the present argument sharply disagrees with
all forms of behaviorism: it also differs radically from the analysis
put forward by the late Dr Trigant Burrow, to whose works I cor-
dially refer the reader. Where Dr Burrow sees in the use of language
only division and distortion, I read mainly socialization and self-
development.

If all the mechanical inventions of the last five thousand years were
suddenly wiped away, there would be a catastrophic loss of life; but
man would still remain human. But if one took away the function of
interpretation, by destroying the capacity to use language, an earlier
human invention, the whole round earth would fade away more swiftly
than Prospero’s vision: insubstantial and dreamlike, without fhe words
that arrest it and order it into widening patches of significance and
value. Worse than this: man would sink into a more helpless and
brutish state than any animal: close to paralysis. In the case of brain
injury through accident, or in senile decay, one gets final proof of the
key place occupied by man’s symbol-using functions. Where there is
a breakdown of tissue in the brain, sufficient to wipe out large areas
of memory, an aged person will sometimes say: “My sight is poor;
I am getting blind.” Actually, medical examination may prove that the
eyesight remains excellent; so what the afflicted person means is: “I
am losing the capacity to understand what I see: it no longer makes
sense to me.” Once a person ceases to function symbolically, a water
tap would be merely a visible tube of brass, but would not indicate

ORIENTATION TO LIFE .

water, and the nearby glass on the shelf would not, however close the
physical association, suggest a method of bringing water to the lips;
while pictures or verbal texts that represented these objects would be
even less effective in prompting the right actions in response to thirst.
The researches of Dr Kurt Goldstein leave no doubt on this score.

Almost all meaning above the animal level of response comes
through abstraction and symbolic reference: in fact, the symbolic
medium — ^verbal, musical, graphic — is the very one in which man,
as man, lives and moves and has his being. The invention of the symbol
was not merely the first great step from the organic to the super-or-
ganic: it also led to the further development from the social to the
personal. Without constant reference to essences, as represented by
symbols, existence would become empty, meaningless, and absurd —
which is, precisely, what it seems to the mere existentialist. But what
the existentialist, in horror and despair, finds lacking in the world, is
merely what is lacking in his philosophy. Once one throws over sym-
bols and essences as Captain Ahab threw over compass and sextant in
his effort to come to grips with Moby Dick, the empty malice of un-
focused energy, taken into the soul as a paranoid impulse to destruc-
tion, is all that will be left. When one begins by defacing the word one
ends by defaming life. That is part of the plight of modern man.

The symbol-making activities of man, speech and dream, have
turned out, then, to be more than tools, and they have until now played
a far larger part in human life than his technical mastery of the natu-
ral environment, through weapons and machines. Dreaming is the dy-
namic, forward-striving, goal-seeking complement to remembering.
While man’s organic and social memory, through monuments and
books and buildings, opens up for him the large resources of his past,
the dream pushes his life forward to a more varied future, not given
in either nature or his own history: the next moment, the next lifetime,
the next century first comes to him in images of foreboding and hope:
he sees a future pre-formed by the self, obedient to man’s emergent
nature, capable of projecting into public forms the hidden soul.
Through the dream, man offsets his sense of guilt and anxiety, caused
by his willful departure from his animal destiny, by his effort to set
himself up in rivalry with nature and to put forth an independent
creation, more responsive to his nature and desires than the actual
world. So it is not an accident, but the very essence of human life,
that some of its best and its worst moments are lived exclusively in the

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

mind: anxiety and anguish, joy and fulfillment, are never so pure as
they are when represented in art: ‘‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

But note: through the mechanism of the dream, both directly and as
elaborated in the arts, man surpasses his simple biological self both
ways: upward and downward, bettering and worsening his natural self,
embellishing and yet often defiling his environment. Long ago he de-
parted from his ancestral home, in order to spend most of his years
in two resorts of his own devising: heaven and hell. Man’s very devil-
try is a product of the same imagination which first represented his
own utmost potentialities in the image of an all-wise and infinitely
loving God. On this interpretation, literature, music, religion, those
artful by-products of man’s subjective life, are no less integral a part
of man’s existence than the natural world and the ingenious instru-
ments he has devised for mastering it.

In other words, the dream is no mere mechanism of escape, but the
foundation of man’s own specific mode of life: the life that emerges
in the person out of his stolid animal limitations and his compulsive
social controls. However much we admire, with Whitman, the content-
ment and aplomb of animals, our own life-course is a more defiant and
daring one, defiant to the point of madness, but enlivened, in its con-
tradictions, its disparities, its absurdities, by a sense of comedy, which
recognizes, with a, wry grimace, how far his godlike pretensions have
fallen short: how impulse has hardened into habit, how gesture has
frozen into tics and compulsions, how every leap upward has ended,
at last, in a clownish fall. But out of man’s very maladjustment, pro-
moted by his concentration on his inner world, he has achieved a deeper
consciousness of existence, and eventually an ampler sanity arxid-baU
ance than dumb animal existence could achieve. When mankind gave
its days over to babbling and dreaming, life took a new path, at right
angles to the horizontal plane of organic survival. For no promethean
fire has ever burned so steadily or so brightly as the flame man first
lighted within himself.

What holds of the dream holds in almost equal degree of the word.
Every part of the “real” world, from the wooded mountain top to the
towered city, has become material for man’s symbolic activities, and
gains in visibility, and usability, through man’s capacity to interpret
it and re-fashion it in his mind. Even the photographic image of the
remotest star bears the imprint of man’s subjectivity: this pin-point
of white on a dark ground becomes more than that only through the
operation of a complex structure of interpretation that man has built

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

Up since the time of the Chaldean star-gazers. As soon as any part of
the external environment, natural or man-made, ceases to further man’s
purposes, it ceases to have meaning, and even when it remains in sight
it falls out of mind: witness what happened to the Roman baths once
the Christian fathers condemned the ritual of bodily care that they
subserved. Once a structure ceases to have meaning, men will quarry
it for stone, as readily as they would quarry into an open hillside:
witness again the assault on Gothic buildings in eighteenth century
France. So, too, a change in the direction of human interest, an in-
terior subjective change, could wreck New York as destructively as an
atom bomb. On the other hand, even a ‘'Worthless” natural object — a
martyr’s lock of hair or the fragment of Java man’s skull — may ac-
quire value through the projection of meaning upon it: in this case, it
will be guarded tenderly from generation to generation, as if it were
a precious work of art.

At every moment, thanks to our symbols, we are nourished by other
lives that have flourished and faded, leaving behind only an appar-
ently wraithlike deposit of words and images, on paper, stone, or cellu-
loid: a story memorized, an observation recorded, a line skillfully
drawn, a formula condensed in special signs. What man is and does
passes away: what continues in existence is the ever-enlarging struc-
ture of interpretation derived from history, and stored, sifted, trans-
mitted, from generation to generation: that is the capital fund that
makes human productivity and creativity, indeed the very capacity to
become human, possible. Since man not only lives his life but repre-
sents it to himself, since he not merely accepts the order of nature but
re-fashions it in his mind, the very subjective elements that destroy
his animal harmony contribute to his creativity. Man is happiest when
he feels that all his frustrations and struggles, though often painful,
may have significance: he is unhappy, on the contrary, when he be-
lieves that even his most pleasurable fulfillments may be meaningless.
Whatever else man’s social heritage has done for him, its chief func-
tion has been to lay a stable foundation of values, meanings, and pur-
poses beneath his life-sustaining activities.

Against the long-prevalent view that man is but an insignificant
speck in a sterile, depersonalized universe, the present philosophy
holds that it is the physical universe that is insignificant until man
emerges from it and lakes possession of it and interprets it in terms
of his own past and future. Apart from man’s purposes and values, a

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

grain of dirt is as important as a planetary system: without man both
are in fact non-entities.

Man, in other words, is the agent through which natural events be-
come intelligible and natural forces valuable, since events and forces
may be increasingly directed, in accordance with man’s own plan of
life, to their human, and eventually their divine, destination. While
this fact makes man an active mediator it does not turn him into a God.
Apart from mind and spirit, word and dream, man’s powers are in
fact smaller than the forces acting upon him; and he is accordingly
at their mercy: a change of a few degrees upward or downward in the
body’s temperature will bring about human death. Tliis philosophy
conceives the role played by man as interpreter as the apex of natural
existence: the quintessence of all that has gone before, the embryonic
vehicle of developments and fulfillments that lie far ahead, Man’s
ability to interpret the world truly, with insight into potentialities as
well as causes, gives the measure of his ability to transform it.

Man, in his full historic dimensions, encloses the primitive and the
sophisticated, the infantile and the mature: he lakes into himself limes
past and times to come, places near and places distant, the seen and
the unseen, the actual and the possible. What was once called the ob-
jective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture,
each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads
a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot
itself. Like Brahma, man himself is the slayer and the slain, the
knower and the known, the creator and the creature of a world which,
tliough it encloses him, he also transcends. Though he did not fabricate
the world he has colored every part of it by his consciousness and re-
constituted it by his intelligence.

If man has surpassed his animal destiny, it is because he has util-
ized the dream and the word to open up territory that cannot be reached
on foot or opened up with ax or plow. He has learned to ask questions
for which, in the limits of a single lifetime or a single epoch of cul-
ture, he will never find the answer. Each civilization treats that terri-
tory, boundless and almost impenetrable, as in some significant way
the coeval of its familiar homeland: it represents the sum of things
worth living for and worth dying for: the values and purposes that not
merely evoke a higher life, but even justify death itself, through whose
foreknowledge, applied to the affairs of the moment, man further over-
rides his animal limitations. As zero and infinity give him a sense of
possibilities he cannot reckon with the aid of his ten digits, so his

ORIENTATION TO LIFE

heavens and hells bring to light otherwise hidden potentialities of his
earthly existence; and the ideal is accordingly the fourth dimension
of every structure he builds.

This sphere is the realm of religion: the sphere beyond knowledge
and certainty, where ultimate mystery itself adds a new dimension to
meaning. Out of the silence of infinite space comes a sound: the birth
cry of human consciousness. Against the enveloping darkness man
throws the searchlight of his intelligence. As man projects further the
cone of light, through his gifts of interpretation, he likewise widens
the perimeter of the surrounding darkness. The ultimate gift of con-
scious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

CHAPTER III.

COSMOS AND PERSON

1: ON THE USE OF UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS

If there were general agreement as to the nature of man and the
purpose of life, it would have been unnecessary to attempt preliminary
definitions. But unfortunately even the sciences that deal directly with
man cannot, within their present framework, provide such agreement:
for their conclusions assume the validity and sufficiency of their par-
ticular method of inquiry. In its quest for certainty, science keeps to
the broad, visible, neatly edged paths and avoids the obscure thickets
of subjectivism: this means that it rejects, as either indecipherable or
negligible, a considerable part of mankind’s experience. Because such
science can predict future behavior only in terms of the known past,
it must leave out many potentialities not so determined; and because
it deals with statistical order, it has tended to reject the unique and the
non-repeatable, though such events may powerfully affect the course
of human development.

Up to now the sciences have sought limited answers to limited and
isolated problems: they have not concerned themselves with the pat-
tern of the whole. Religion historically preceded science in attempting
to interpret the cosmos and man’s part in its processes; and it has
worked on a radically different set of assumptions, although at various
points, in their early development, the paths of science and religion
coincided. Because of its reliance on subjective revelation, religion has
dared to include whole tracts of human experience that escape the sci-
entific net, no matter how fine the mesh or how skillful tlie casting.
"Turpose,” ^Value,” ^‘free will,” ‘‘potentiality,” “ideal,” and “final
goal” have had, until today, no place in the scientific description of the
physical world, whose special mode of interpretation was developed
in the seventeenth century. But these concepts and categories are so
essential for an account of human experience in its entirety that their
absence from the original scientific world picture — an omission over

COSMOS AND PERSON

which positivism once took pride — is enough to make one doubt either
its accuracy or its sufficiency. That doubt is now confirmed in the most
advanced departments of science.

Religion, as I shall here define it, is a body of intuitions and work-
ing beliefs that issue out of that part of man’s nature and experience
which science, deliberately seeking piecemeal knowledge of an im-
mediately verifiable nature, rejects. For the questions that religion
asks are not concerned with particulars but with the whole: not spe-
cific questions as to What and How? but questions of the widest gen-
erality and the most teasing elusiveness: Why? Wherefore? For what
purpose? Toward what end? Religion seeks, in other words, not a de-
tailed causal explanation of this or that aspect of life, but a reasonable
account of the entire sum of things.

All the transient phenomena, of life and civilization and the human
personality religion sets against the cosmic perspectives of time and
space. The concepts of infinity and eternity, which are not verifiable
by piecemeal observation, have been the very core of the higher re-
ligious consciousness: so at a period in culture when the scientific mind
was still bogged in the materialism of the four elements, earth, air,
fire, and water, a Pytliagoras or a Plato sought to deduce from har-
monic mathematical relationships a clue to a deeper pattern of order.
In its widest reaches, religion concerns itself with the impenetrable
substratum of reality; with what, from the standpoint of science, is
unknowable: the mysteriiim tremendum.

In terms of positive science, most of the questions religion puts are
unanswerable questions; and for the conventional scientist, still im-
prisoned in a partial, mechanistic ideology, they represent illusory
problems. The very vocabulary of religion is regarded by many sci-
entists as nonsense, because it cannot be turned into the Basic English
of operationalism. So much the worse, then, for the limitations of the
scientific method: primitive tribes and little children, who dare ask
the same unanswerable questions, are in practice wiser, for they are
not inhibited in their concern with the whole, and are not embarrassed
in the free utterance of their bafiiements, their forebodings, their hopes.

Once man achieves consciousness, there is no way of casting off
these questions or of evading a provisional answer, without repressing
an essential quality in life itself. Even when men try to evade any
concern with ultimate issues, by losing themselves in the day’s work,
filling their spiritual emptiness with excesses of food or drink, or with
a surfeit of esthetic sensibility and abstract knowledge — for there are

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

gluttons and drunkards of the spirit, too — they are still haunted by
the specters of themselves and by their relation to the universe: the
selves that might have been: the selves that still may be.

Such people may, like the elder Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s novel,
seek to lose themselves in squalid love affairs, and may deliberately
scorn and mock those who seek to confront the mystery of their being,
as old Karamazov sniveled and grimaced before Father Zossima: yet
the very intensity of their reaction only shows, perhaps, the depth of
the human need. If human life has no purpose and meaning, then the
philosophy that proclaims this fact is even emptier than the situation
it describes. If, on the other hand, there is more to man’s fate and his-
tory than meets the eye, if the process as a whole has significance,
then even the humblest life and the most insignificant organic function
will participate in that ultimate meaning.

We shall never get to the bottom of man’s nature and his present
dilemmas, unless we realize that he is, to begin with, the kind of
creature who has persistently asked such ultimate questions about him-
self and the universe: indeed he is so thirsty for this order of truth
that he will swallow it in almost any degree of dilution or adulteration.
And so far, let us confess, those questions are wiser than all the an-
swers, From the beginning man views life, above all his own life, with
a mixture of curiosity, humility, and wonder: he claims the Unknown
as his province and the Unknowable as his object, for the reason that
he realizes that the true condition of man is “‘beyond him,” and that
the fate of man is not entirely in his own hands.

Man’s answers to these mysteries were bound by the very terms of
his own finite nature to be inadequate. However penetrating his vision,
whatever man finds out about the all-enveloping world must be only
so much of it as he can encompass within his person and culture:
an infinitesimal sample in space and time. Almost certainly, his sense
of the whole came forth at only a late date in his evolution and is
plainly one of his most fragile and imperfect achievements. Yet each
one of us, in some degree, resonates to the world as a whole, and picks
up and transforms waves that come from distant transmitting stations:
we hear their noise in our receivers, perhaps, long before we have
learned the code or are able to spell out any part of the message. But
because man has sought to project himself beyond the here and now,
because he has been willing to traffic with the inactual, the unknown,
the mysterious, he has had a better grasp of cosmic processes than a
more limited, down-to-earth attitude would have given him. The little

COSMOS AND PERSON

questions, for which there are definite answers, have an important
practical function: yet it is only within the larger frame that they are
fully significant* Nothing can be settled until everything is settled. The
first step in the re-education of man is for him to come to terms with
his ultimate destiny.

Each culture has developed its own way of putting these ultimate
questions about man’s nature and fate ; and has assigned special values
to the experiences symbolized as God, eternity, immortality, being and
non-being. The answers to these questions differ in innumerable de-
tails; yet they all point to a common substratum of human experience
which is none the less real because language is so inept and ineffec-
tual in coping with it. Most of the more naive conceits of theology are,
to a great degree, impatient attempts to picture, in familiar terms,
more obvious forms of continuity between the known and the unknown,
between the immediate and the whole, the manifest and the mysterious,
than the facts warrant. Yet without some recognition of the whole, the
part played by earthly life would be almost as meaningless as the
severed hand, in Aristotle’s famous illustration, if one did not know
its normal connections with the human body: the organ, by its very
existence, implies the organism it serves.

Just as the anatomist, given the fragment of a human skull, can re
construct with reasonable certainty many other characteristics of the
head and even the rest of the human body, so the religious mind, re-
peatedly plumbing the depths of human experience, may have a faint
twilight perception of the constitution of the universe itself; though no
finite mind will ever grasp it fully or exhaust all its possibilities till
the end of time: for time, in all its organic and human implications,
is part of what must be revealed. Man’s deepest needs prompt him to
this exploration: the very concept of the stellar universe, as enveloping
man’s lifetime and persisting beyond it, came from man’s deliberate
attempt to give a rational account of his own appearance and acts, his
birth, his ordeals, his triumphs, his frustrations, and his final disso-
lution.

Even a false picture of man’s cosmic relations — and no picture can
be free from many finite human errors — may give a closer image of
reality than no picture at all. Granted that man overestimates his
powers and over-values his own organs: granted that he often gives
too absolute a value to his individual life and its prolongation: granted
that he freely projects his own passions and animosities upon the uni-
verse itself, as Dante did in his vision of the Inferno — ^there is still

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

more of the cosmic process in these distorted pictures than in the neat
mathematical frame of positive science, which disdains even to place
a picture within its boundaries. Partiality and persistent error in a
field of genuine interest are more active paths to truth than indifference.

2 ; THE MYTHOLOGIES OF MAN

Man has told himself many stories about his origin and his destina-
tion. Two things are common to these myths: they reflect, with simple
childlike unconsciousness, the humble details of his daily life; and
they recognize the existence of agents and forces he has never beheld
with his eyes or seized with his hand, though in one fashion or an-
other he has had to account for their activities. Admittedly, man can-
not discard the suggestions of his immediate environment: the land-
scape of his daily life envelops his fantasy. If he suffers from heat,
like the tribes of the desert, his Hell will be an eternity of fire and
brimstone: if he gets lost in exploring the limestone caves of Attica,
his Hades will be a cold, pale underground world where half-living
souls move about in the leaden light: if a volcano dominates the plains
below it, as in Hawaii or in Mexico, the fiercest and most powerful of
his gods will spring from that volcano.

This naivete is not easily put away, even by modern science. If one
translated the abstract symbols of present-day materialism into the
concrete images that most closely fit them, we would behold a vast
automatic assembly line, without a designer at one end or a product
at the other, along whose conveyor belt machines assembled themselves
by accident and were broken up by intention (fatal law of entropy!)
only to re-enter the process once more as belts, shafts, or carburetors,
at some point in the assembly line: the gains and losses of this process
being accurately tabulated by automatic electronic calculators in a
non-existent accounting department.

But these myths have another side to them: neither the quality of
man’s environment nor the pressure of his daily animal needs fully
accounts for their wide scope or their remarkable power of abstraction
and detachment. They pose unanswerable questions; or rather, they
suggest answers that can be verified in part only by being lived: yet
the single life span of the individual man cannot, since the questions
concern the cosmos, provide any positive answer. Consider these un-
answerable questions, as they come down to modern man from a dis-
tant past.

COSMOS AND PERSON

Is man a mote lost in the infinite vistas of time and space, the help-
less sport of random forces, the product of indifferent elements, the
prey of hostile energies, crippled by savage encounters with Moby
Dick — all moving in some cosmic Brownian movement? Is he a smok-
ing candle with a charred wick, giving no light beyond the pale of his
own little niche: a poor flame flickering in a wind that will speedily
extinguish it? Do his feebleness and his physical insignificance make
a mockery of his gigantic exercise of mind; and is this mind of his
itself but an accidental infection on the blank face of matter, soon to
be absorbed in vaster physical processes? If so, the only way out of
man’s presumed littleness and helplessness would be to use the feeble
light itself, the conscious rational mind, as Bertrand Russell in his
youth suggested, to contemplate without hope the greatness that mocks
it. The myth is that of materialism; the decision, stoicism.

Or is man the center of all cosmic intentions? Is he, in fact, tlie
prodigal offspring of a loving Deity, who has defied the will of his
Eternal Father and gone astray? Has he through his willfulness thrust
himself out of his Garden of Eden, where he was at one with all crea-
tion, in order to eat the apple of the tree of knowledge, the apple that
made him conscious of his short span of individual life and his ap-
proaching death; and is he thereby condemned, in his battle against
death, to work by the sweat of his brow, laboring ere the night cometh,
instead of growing serenely like the lily of the fields?

Does man’s nature, then, partake both of the earthly and the divine,
but is it steeped in an original sin that springs from his pride and self-
love; and is he thus lost and damned forever until divine intervention
redeems him? Does man, condemned to daily toil to get his bread,
riddled with disease, racked with pain, prone to error and evil, have
no true fulfillment on earth? Is it provided that the answers he seeks
here and now will be found only if he prepares himself for another
world and turns all his hopes and aspirations there? Does he begin his
true life only with death: the passage to a life eternal, where he will
enact a new role, not subject to earth’s burdens — or alas! to its stimu-
lating challenges — so that he will spend eternity solely in the blissful
contemplation of God?

That is the myth of Christianity; and with variations, the myth of
every other after-worldly religion, which shifts the center of gravity
from the earth to heaven, from tlie kingdom of life to the kingdom of
death. For Plato this palpable world was a cave of darkness where
man was but a prisoner, forced to spend his days with his back turned

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

to the light: so that all he knew of the verities that lay outside the
cave were but the shadow reflections cast upon the wall. The world of
his senses was thus a kind of nonsense; and the world unreachable by
his senses, but divined with the aid of logic and mathematics, was that
in which his deliverance and the final significance of his life lay.

Or is man a being chained to an eternal cycle of recurrence, in
which he slowly, with many backslidings, climbs upward in the ladder
of being? Does he live in a world where by pious observances of ritual
and by progressive spiritual detachment he may ultimately dissociate
himself from his animal needs and his exorbitant capacities for pain
and misery, concealed even in his briefest pleasures and joys? May
he thus escape from the dismal cycle of animal existence: may he,
even while he is on earth, by strict efforts and disciplines, cast off
his animal role and unite wdth the source of all energy and life,
blessed through spiritual exercises by ineffable illumination {sattva)^
which those of lesser faith and more sluggish energies {tamas) will
accomplish for themselves only through a long series of reincarna-
tions, till they, too, become part of llial Being wdiich is also Non-
Being. This is the core of the discipline of many forms of asceti-
cism and withdrawal. United to this conception of many hierarchies
of being and godhead, as in Hinduism, or to a depersonalized universe,
as in Buddhism, this notion of the cosmic role of man, as a casting off
of his animal limitations and a final re-union with Brahma, takes ac-
count of every stage of inertia and illumination; yet leaves one with
the unaccountable irrationality of the performance itself.

These classic answers about the human predicament themselves
raise further questions about the nature of man. Is man merely a
paranoid animal, haunted by delusions of grandeur, unwilling to co-
operate with the forces that assign to him a more humble position than
he fancies he occupies: or is he in fact the offspring of Prometheus, he
who stole fire from Olympus, claiming for man that which was once
the sole possession of the gods; and are his delusions of persecution
not altogether imaginary ones, since the emergence from his animal
state brings disabilities that animals themselves have not yet achieved
and the gods, so to say, have passed beyond?

Does man live only from day to day, walled in by animal needs he
can never escape, and accordingly never more absurdly limited than
when he fancies he has stepped out of this modest role: a creature con-
soling himself for his low estate and his niggardly inheritance by
seeking pleasures that will never satisfy him and creating willful illu-

COSMOS AND PERSON

sions that, in his own heart of hearts, he recognizes as little better than
the toys and dolls of his childhood: vital lies, puppet creatures of his
own fantasy?

Or again, is man, if only a frail reed, still, as Pascal said, a thinking
reed: adding to the universe by his very presence something that with-
out his aid, despite countless eons of groaning in travail, it might never
have brought forth? Are his sensibilities and his feelings nothing?
Are his knowledge and his consciousness nothing? Does their rarity,
as one sweeps over the whole range of cosmic forces and events, make
them less precious or less significant? If his god is but the enlargement
by thousands of diameters of the power, the love, the knowledge he
has developed through his own evolution, is that divine quality itself
less real because of this? '

Perhaps, beyond the scope of these myths and parables, there is
some larger purpose and some deeper significance in man’s life than
any of his historic questions have hinted, or any of his historic an-
swers have proposed. For the more that positive knowledge advances
in every realm, from nuclear physies to the inchoate world of the un-
conscious, the more one begins to detect an underlying pattern, an
emerging order of design: a pattern and order through which freedom
supervenes upon necessity, purpose upon chance, and the person him-
self upon the cosmos that envelops him. These questions, at all events,
with many parallel ones, are the questions originally set by the classic
religions; and though the nature of the cosmos itself keeps any of the
answers from being final, the very act of translating these intuitions
into acts and observances, into rituals and codes and disciplines for
the daily life, yes, into governmental systems and technologies, has
itself given a new form and content to human existence. If every in-
stitution is the lengthened shadow of a man, as Emerson observed,
every man bears a mask upon his face; and that mask is the counte-
nance of his god.

The belief that man’s life is not an insignificant local phenomenon,
but a meaningful and progressively intelligible part of a cosmic proc-
ess, is common to all the higher religions: the religions by which the
most fully developed and most numerous groups of mankind have
lived. Since it represents an experience deeply grounded in human
history, this intuition is not Ifghtly to be rejected: indeed, from the
standpoint of the present philosophy, it must not be rejected at all:
for Man is wiser than men, and the conscious knowledge of any single

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

generation cannot be compared for trustworthiness with the funded
experience of mankind. If life is what is at stake, then it should be
plain that when men think and feel and act, in relation to an overall
cosmic pattern, life flourishes and men grow to fuller stature: as they
do not flourish and grow when man’s life is held to be no more than
the grass that is shoved into the oven and burned.

Man’s biological survival, we know now, is actually involved in
cosmic processes and prospers best when some sense of a cosmic pur-
pose attends his daily activities. Man’s positive knowledge of these
processes and purposes is but a film that supports him as the skin on
a glass of warm milk supports a fly: he must rest lightly on the surface
or perish. When he seeks to drink from the liquid below, he will find
further nourishment, no doubt; but it is included in the fact of his
own nature that he will never drain the glass dry: measured by his
flylike capacities it is in fact fathomless, and at best he may hope that
the samples he takes, at various intervals, will reveal something about
the constitution of what lies beyond his capacity to take in. That depth
of mystery is at once a frustration and a compelling incentive to man’s
activity: being godlike, he must seek to penetrate it; being finite, he
must accept failure.

The other side of the cosmic mystery issues from the nature of man’s
own limitations. If in some fashion he embodies the creative forces of
the universe, he also carries within him, through his continuity with
the physical world itself, all those countervailing tendencies summar-
ized in the law of entropy: for life defies this downward tendency, but
at last succumbs to it. Eventually, man must come to terms, even as
individual men must, with his creatureliness and his finiteness. Noth-
ing that man does endures: none of the values man seeks, none of the
purposes he fulfills, none of the knowledge he acquires, is altogether
imperishable: the very nature of life itself is to be precarious, in-
secure, frail, vulnerable, evanescent. When man tries to apply some
fixative to keep the color of his precious picture from rubbing off, he
falsifies the color in the very act of preservation and thus loses what
he seeks to keep: so every attempt to transpose life into etp.rnity, by
stone monuments, laws written on tables of brass, or pious repetitions,
also arrests life and eventually destroys it.

Only by constant reproduction and renewal can life endure: this is
true in the biological realm and equally true in the realm of spirit.
In beauty and truth and goodness man finds his highest satisfactions:

COSMOS AND PERSON

the whole experience of the race attests this fact; and to crown these
qualities with love is to come as close to the pinnacle of human experi-
ence as is possible. But does man fulfill these high possibilities of ex-
istence? On the contrary: no small part of man’s activities results in
the defacement of beauty, the misappropriation of truth, the miscar-
riage of justice, the perversion of goodness. This potential god, in
other words, has a devil in him; his worst suspicions about the universe
are confirmed by his own persistent misbehavior. Thus man’s life for
all its godlike qualities is plagued by perpetual contradictions between
his pretensions and his acts: not least between his cosmic intuitions and
his more sordid daily occupations: ^‘getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers.” No small part of man’s activities by their very repetition
smother those moments of illumination in which man finds himself
exalted — and fulfilled.

Plainly, man must come to terms with himself in some fashion, be-
fore he can understand the world or transform his own nature, in con-
formity to ever higher ranges of purpose, ever higher standards of
value. No small part of the office of the classic religions has consisted
in penetrating man’s illusions about himself: in breaking down his
rationalizations of his own misconduct, in exposing his pretenses and
hypocrisies, in bringing home an appropriate sense of guilt over his
failure to fulfill his own potentialities, and in helping him to overcome
his animal inertia; since too often he is content to fall back to the
survival level of his species, instead of pushing upward to the higher
transformations of the person. Religion, even to such a prudent natu-
ralist philosopher as John Dewey, is essentially the ‘‘sphere of the
possible.” The function of the classic religions, as one finds them in
history, is to confront the paradoxes and contradictions and the ulti-
mate mysteries of man and the cosmos: to make sense and reason of
what lies beneath the irreducible irrationalities of man’s life: to pierce
the surrounding darkness with pin-points of light, or occasionally to
rip away for a startling moment the cosmic shroud.

In brief compass, I shall try now to appraise this contribution, in
order to bring out certain common elements which will remain a per-
manent contribution to every adequate philosophy of human life. In
so far as the traditional religions have given expression to these ele-
ments and have shaped our response to them, they will, I believe, like-
wise help express and shape the new -personality and the new culture
that must emerge from our present chaos of creeds and ideologies.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

3: THE EMERGENCE OF THE DIVINE

Because of the narrow time-limits of his own life, it is natural that
man should think of the universe itself as having a beginning and an
end. Too easily, he conceives of cosmic events as having been set in
motion by forces similar to those that intervene in human life. Man
himself, as Vico observed, can understand things well only by creating
them; so in the effort to understand llie universe, he was disposed, in
conformity with his own nature, to assume a creator who stands out-
side his creation and commands it. In an effort to arrive at intelligibil-
ity, man placed both the physical agency and the moral responsibility
upon the gods, or upon the centralized authority of a single God; om-
nipotent and omniscient figures who, in their turn, were the reflections
of the more mundane control and leadership exercised by the priest-
kings of the earlier civilizations in which the high religions first flour-
ished. These were naive presumptions and gratuitous explanations;
but natural.

So conceived, as encompassing the universe yet outside it, as mov-
ing but unmoved, as immanent in all its creatures yet separate from
them by unspeakable distances, towering above them in awful perfec-
tions and finalities, God himself has become more of a problem than
the problems his existence would solve. In order to come closer to this
mystery, man has then conceived God in more human shapes that are
themselves equally contradictory and self-negating: as Yin and Yang,
as Hora and Osiris, as Eternal Male and Eternal Female, as omnipotent
power and all-embracing love: as the phallic principle of fertility and
as the divine seed that is buried in the earth in the dying year and
resurrected with the awakening of the vegetation in the spring. In one
aspect, God is unpicturable fathomless immensity, the nameless one;
and in another, he becomes incarnated as Krishna the Archer, as Bud-
dha the Illumined One, as Christ the Saviour. In all these forms, God
both accounts for the existence and completes the meaning of human
life.

Historically, the sense of the divine is almost inseparable from
man’s sense of his own destiny; for nothing about his life is more
strange to him or more unaccountable in purely mundane terms than
the stirrings he finds in himself, usually fitful but sometimes over-
whelming, to look beyond his animal existence and not be fully satis-
fied with its immediate substance. He lacks the complacency of the

COSMOS AND PERSON

Other animals: he is obsessed by pride and guilt, pride at being some-
thing more than a mere animal, guilt at falling perpetually short of the
high aims he sets for himself* Behind this strange discontent lies his
persistent belief, visible almost from the time that the presence of
man can be identified by burial mounds, that the course of life does
not fully reveal man’s meaning and destiny: that all existence has goals
and ends, still almost impenetrable, which in their further unfolding
will give fuller meaning to the cosmic solitude and the frustrating
brevity of man’s life. Even now these ends are difficult to approach
by pure speculation; and no wonder: could the earliest one-celled or-
ganism anticipate the eventual emergence of a multi-celled, highly or-
ganized, self-conscious creature, living in a world re-made in part
through his own arts, in colonies and partnerships whose complexity
had no parallel in the primal ooze?

This sense of the divine is an historic fact of man’s nature: no theory
that ignores it or explains it away can do justice to all the dimensions
of human existence. What is gratuitous on man’s part is the belief that
he has any positive knowledge of cosmic intentions or any definite
clues to the ultimate goals of this process. WTiat he too confidently
characterizes as divine revelation is often premature and presumptuous.

But for man’s life to have meaning and purpose, one need not con-
ceive that any part of it existed predetermined, foreordained, from
the beginning of time: still less that time itself has a beginning or an
ending. Every step in the process of cosmic evolution, no matter how
plausible the connections, how closely related the stages when one
looks back upon them, may be a magnificent series of improvisations,
in which each emergent element, iri its very novelty, may suggest a
still further step not even dimly defined at the earlier stages of the
process. As the action proceeds, it becomes increasingly significant,
gathering meaning and value as a snowball gathers bulk and momen-
tum when it rolls downhill.

The universe, like man himself, who is continuous with it, may he
in the midst of a process of self-fabrication: chaos shaking down into
order: order providing a basis for pattern and purposive transforma-
tion: purposes diverging into alternative routes, leading to disengage-
ment and detachment from biological compulsions, and so finally to
human freedom. To suppose that this is the work of a detached author,
' who has written the script and has supervised the performance, is to
go far beyond the warranted evidence; while to suppose that it is an

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

aimless accretion of accidents is to claim a iar greater miracle for
materialism than religion has ever claimed for God.

Plainly, it is man’s littleness that has prompted him to affix his own
special interests and preoccupations, often of the most limited range,
to cosmic and organic processes. We must discount these anthropomor-
phic projections, even when they appear in the sterile laboratory garb
of science. Wliat is at fault is not our sense of mystery and divinity,
for this rests on valid translations of human experience: we err merely
in our effort to cast this intuition in a too-familiar mold, in order to
pass more freely from the known to the unknown. Our mistake has
been to regard the process of development as being predetermined at
either the beginning or the end : we have looked for an enclosed system
witli a single cause at the beginning, a single consummation at the end.
But the tendency toward organization, development, life, personality
does not in fact become wholly intelligible by tracing it back to its
origins: the climax of meaning lies, in all probability, in the future.

In other words, a large part of man’s nature and destiny must be
taken on faith; and the groundwork of that faith is no firmer in sci-
ence than it is in religion. The equation of life cannot be solved more
quickly by sneaking a look at the answer in the back of the arithmetic
book. Improvisations and surprises are as deep in tlie grain of reality
as necessity. If the creative power knew the answer beforehand there
would be no reason to work it out.

Now the classic religions have not erred in holding that a sense of
the divine alters every other perspective in human life. That is a fact
of experience, not universal, perhaps, but confirmed in some sense by
even the crudest cultures : only an occasional arrested culture, like that
of the Eskimo, seems to exhibit a certain cosmic color blindness here.
On the present interpretation, however, religion has so far erred in
identifying God with totality of existence or being; or, worse, in trying
to make God the groundwork of all processes and events; the all-power-
ful and all-knowing providence. By placing God in a position of active
responsibility for the cosmic processes, or for man’s special existence,
almost every system of theology has saddled itself with false dilemmas,
and seeking an answer to the unanswerable, has come up with childish
rationalizations.

For mark this: if one puts God at the beginning, as the creator of
all things, he becomes a monstrous being, as the God of the Old Testa-
ment in fact seemed to the sensitive Manichees, who took note of his
irrational angers and his bloody commands long before Voltaire. That

COSMOS AND PERSON

God is a god of matter, bestiality, darkness, and pain: not a god of
love and light. If, on the other hand, one attempts to unbind deity from
responsibility for having produced a world half lost to the powers of
darkness and death, by promising some redemption, at least for man,
in an eternal future which will balance up accounts and make love
prevail: if one does this one seems to turn a brutal god into a demented
one, a creature capable of condemning human beings to an eternity of
torture for sins committed in the briefest of lifetimes: a savagely dis-
proportionate system of punishment repulsive to reason and justice.
If the God who permitted the slaughter of the innocent in the Lisbon
earthquake shocked Voltaire, what would he have said to the God who
permitted his creatures to invent the insane horrors of Buchenwald and
Auschwitz?

Neither faith nor reason could bring such complete defilements and
miscarriages of life within the compass of human acceptance, if a
divine purpose actually presided over all the occasions of human life.
Plainly, if there is a loving God he must be impotent: but if he is
omnipotent, truly responsible for all that happens within his domain,
capable of heeding even the sparrow’s fall, he can hardly be a loving
God. Such contradictions drive honest minds to atheism: the empty
whirl and jostle of atoms becomes more kind to human reason than
such a deity.

Is the sense of divinity, then, a mere figment of the imagination, a
radical misinterpretation of the elements man finds in his own nature?
No: it is only as an over-ruling benevolent providence that the divine
is a figment. Our logic is at fault in assigning God to the wrong end
of the cosmic process. The universe does not issue out of God, in con-
formity with his fiat: it is rather God who in the long processes of time
emerges from the universe, as the far-off event of creation and the ulti-
mate realization of the person toward which creation seems to move.
God exists, not at the beginning, but at the end: we shall not find him,
except in an incredible degree of tenuity in the earliest stages of the
formative process; for he first disclosed himself in a self-revealing
and identifiable form, only in the human heart, as a truly personal
God. There are, however, many dim foreshadowings of the divine
throughout the animal world: without the lower forms of order and
purpose in nature, the higher forms he tends toward could not be
achieved. Suppose, then, that God is not the active creator, as con-
ceived in the Sacred Books, the Vedas and Korans and Bibles: suppose,
rather, that he is the ultimate outcome of creation; so that the Kingdom

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

of God, latent in nature, is the ideal consummation of the whole proc-
ess. That assumption, I submit, makes be Her sense.

If one puls God at the beginning of tlie whole cosmic transformation,
one adds to the present irrationalities of life, I repeat, the even deeper
mystery and irrationality invoked by the explanation itself. At that
point, the only answer to man’s most insistent problems is the peremp-
tory one given to Job: ‘T am that I am:” which means ‘'Stop asking
unanswerable questions!” But if one finds God at the other end of the
process, not as the foundation wdiich underlies the whole structure of
life, but as the still unfinished pinnacle lliat may ultimately crown it,
the world’s development and human life itself begin to take on a ra-
tional form; for man’s business becomes not so much the mere con-
templation as the active creation of the divine. In the light of the
eventual destination, even earlier steps in development, hitherto mean-
ingless or valueless, even insensate and irrational, become through
this divine foreboding more significant. Begotten in the human soul
itself, but never fully at home there, the divine comes as a further step
in man’s detachment from his animal beginnings: a step beyond that
taken through the development of culture itself. This unfinished, still-
evolving deity has never dominated the universe and is not responsible
for its present condition: far from it But because of his emergence,
nature, itself may undergo an otherwise unthinkable transformation.

Something like this was in William James’s mind, possibly, when
he conceived God as a limited being, needing our help. If one con-
tinued, in the vein of the classic religions, to believe in God’s omni-
presence and omnipotence, one would be forced, in order to retain one’s
reason and one’s reverence for his benign manifestations, to close one’s
eyes to the thousand ugly incidents of life that confound any attribu-
tion to this being of either supreme intelligence or unfaltering love.
^^Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Distressed by the gritty facts
of human experience, the mystic thrusts the world of sense impatiently
aside in order to reach God directly and bathe in the presence of his
glory and illumination. Tliat is perhaps a happy transitory adjust-
ment; but it hardly reconciles the awakened soul to the frustrations
aud evils of life even at its most prosperous moments, to say nothing
of the potential horrors that civilization, by its very advances in sci-
ence, now holds before us'i The “Perennial Philosophy” buys its ob-
livion too cheaply, by treating as. mere illusion that part of man’s
existence which it is most difficult to assimilate to reason and love: it

COSMOS AND PERSON

thus turns its back on the love and pity men need in order to maintain
its own inner poise.

As soon as religion, in fact, makes its God the creator and all-wise
author of the universe, it must either gloze over the evils of existence
at the expense of truth, or it must invoke another principle, equally at
work in the universe, which brings the creator’s work to naught, defac-
ing his creatures and defaming his beneficent intentions. Sheer logic
thus drove many of the classic religions to the invention of the Devil
or the Destroyer, the mythical equivalent of the second law of thermo-
dynamics, who undermines all the constructive activities of life. As
Kali, as Ahriman, as Satan, as Loki, the devil personifies an inescap-
able fact of human experience: the fact of de-building, disorganiza-
tion, degradation.

William Morton Wheeler’s discussion of Emergent Evolution is
exemplary, because he fully reckons with these possibilities of Abbau^
or de-building; whereas various modern attempts to unify every aspect
of man’s experience by using a one-directional formula of process and
organization, like that of Mr Lancelot Whyte, come partly to grief,
because they must either deny the polar alternatives of goodness and
badness, of development and deformation, or fail to give an adequate
account of these downward tendencies. To the extent that the higher
religions have allowed for the fact that integration and disintegration
go hand in hand, their mythology is less untrue to the facts of life
than the Marxian description, which sees process as working in a single
direction.

A sound philosophy, it seems to me, must embrace the facts of hu-
man experience hitherto represented in the symbols of a creative god
and a destructive devil: the one directed toward greater fulfillment of
life, the other tempting it to lose sight of its higher goals and regress
to lower planes of evolution. But for the sake of clarity, one should
combine these ambivalent cosmic forces into a single figure, applicable
to all natural processes; and not confuse two-faced Nature with the
emergent aspect of divinity, which derives from the fuller develop-
ment of the human person.

When one treats God, then, as the symbol for a new emergent, com-
ing at the very last stage of all observable development, one 'has a
foundation for an inescapable fact of human experience, which would
otherwise, if God were in fact omnipotent and responsible, be highly
disconcerting: namely, that so far from being omnipresent and all-
enveloping, divinity is the rarest attribute of human existence. So rare,

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

SO intermittent, indeed, is the presence of divinity in human affairs that
when it appears in any heavy concentration, it becomes the center of
a new way of viewing the world and acting in it, in the person of an
Ikhnalon, a Moses, a Zarathustra, a Buddha, a Confucius, a Jesus; and
ivhen such a person appears, a whole society takes on a new shape and
reveals new possibilities in thought and action and the general conduct
of life. In diffused and diluted forms, these potentialities for freedom
and creation are always at work, in some degree, in every community.
But their intervention is so rare that, when they decisively come forth
and work tlieir special transformation, they set human history on a
new course.

Unfortunately, that manifestation of an emergent divinity is fragile
and precarious: so powerless to preserve itself, that not a single re-
ligion has been able to save itself from either corruption or mummi-
fication at an early stage. Even while Moses was among the Jews,
journeying through the wilderness, his fellow tribesmen turned to the
worship of brazen serpents instead of Elohim, the unrepresentable, the
unfathomable, the voice in the burning bush. That story stands for a
hundred similar degradations in the history of every great religious
impulse: witness tlie transformation of Jesus’s essential doctrine and
example by the Church that preserved it. The divine may be constantly
radioactive; but the human isotopes, which divinity has quickened,
have but a short life.

Now possibly a life-conserving inertia is at work here. If God were
actually dominant, it would be as if radium were as heavily distributed
in the earth’s crust as iron: his presence might well consume the uni-
verse and blast the life it had come to bless. But the actual situation
seems just the reverse of this. Only flashes and glimmers of godhood
appear in history, usually mingled, like radium in pitchblende, with
vast quantities of baser stuff. Yet those visions of higher forms of ex-
istence, of new potentialities for development, if fleeting, are likewise
so intense that when they appear they quickly impart their light and
heat to a whole society; for when man finds them in his consciousness,
he feels nearer to the purpose of his being than at any other moment
of his life.

God, in this sense, points to an order beyond the limitations of natu-
ral existence, of biological survival, or even of a purely human ful-
fillment. Yet all the genuine manifestations of God are so uncertain,
so unpredictable, that his presence has often been counterfeited for
purely mundane purposes: his name has been invoked, too often, to

COSMOS AND PERSON

sanctify inertia and to rationalize regression. Though everywhere men
have organized institutions and erected buildings to guard their vision
of divinity and to re-awaken faith in man’s divine possibilities, a faith
too often shaken by the trials of life, it is not through buildings and
ceremonies, not through the scribes and the Pharisees, nor yet through
the Levites, that this service is most fully performed.

Notwithstanding its intentions and its sacred mission, religion, I
must emphasize, is open to degradation: perhaps more so than any
other human activity. So the apparatus of salvation becomes one of
the main obstacles to its own achievement: the doctrines of religion
become a device for egoistic assertion, on the part of a tribe or a caste,
rather than an agent of universal purposes, dissolving all hostile man-
made claims and privileges.

Too readily in history, religion, instead of addressing itself to the
general condition of man, has lent itself to buttressing the position and
privilege of the ruling classes, preaching humility to those already in
humble circumstances, instead of to the proud, and resignation to the
victim rather than to his oppressor, as Luther did in his denunciations
of the downtrodden peasants who revolted. Even where these per-
versions have not become flagrant — and what civilization has been
immune to them? — there are many inner obstacles to the search for
the divine. For divinity, by its nature, cannot be decanted into a bottle
and safely corked: it comes like a flash of lightning or like the faint
perfume carried on the summer breeze from a distant meadow. Every
attempt to capture divinity in some permanent form ends by imprison-
ing the spirit of man.

Thus God, as I seek here to interpret human experience, is not the
foundation of human existence: he is the pillar of cloud by day and
the pillar of fire by night that lead men onward in their journey toward
the Promised Land. Yet because man finds in himself an occasional
spark of divinity, because fitfully a tongue of this flame may illuminate
a whole life, man may logically and honestly interpret the entire proc-
ess of organization and organic development as having, in future, an
end other than a mere increase in complexity and heterogeneity. If the
universe, as the physicists now suppose, has taken some three billion
years to come forth out of chaos and old night, God is the faint glim-
mer of a design still fully to emerge, a rationality still to be achieved,
a justice still to be established, a love still to be fulfilled.

In the best representatives of the human species, God becomes mani-
fest in a profound discontent, an impulse toward perfection, a purpose

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

severed from self-preservation or self-inflation. At the fullest stage of
development, man achieves detachment and transcendence: something
both playful and purposive delivers him from his hard physical neces-
sities, or the humiliating limitations of his animal drives. Though con-
ditioned to social existence, he may withdraw from society or defy its
lower claims in the interests of a higher development, as Francis of
Assisi or Thoreau did: though tethered to the will-to-live, a deeper
loyalty may cause him to elect death, rather than animal survival, as
both heroes and martyrs have often done, valuing life intensely, but
valuing the god life has brought forth even more.

Religion develops out of this faith in the meaningfulness of human
experience, set against the background of cosmic mystery: faith in the
reason that underlies all the irrationalities of existence, faith that a
divine purpose, still struggling into existence, will finally prevail.

4: ETERNITY, SEX AND DEATH

Every culture has sought, in terms of its own special situation and
experience, for a provisional answer to the unanswerable questions
that religion propounds. Some cultures, like that of the ancient Greeks,
were mainly oriented toward life; others, like that of the ancient
Egyptians, were oriented toward death; still others, like orthodox
Hinduism and orthodox Christianity, have attempted to encompass
both aSirmation and rejection, the secular here and the holy hereafter.
But in spite of many points of divergence and contradiction, the his-
toric religions share, in fact, large areas of agreement: so large, so
substantial, so significant that the current attempt to reject religion it-
self, as a meaningless survival, infected with superstition, calling for
surgical removal, like a diseased appendix, rests on a more question-
able dogma than the dogmas it questions. Freud’s attitude toward tra-
ditional religions was, perhaps, but the jealousy of a prophet who had,
up his sleeve, a religion of his own: a Wagnerian mythology with
Eros and Psyche in the roles of Tristan and Isolde, seeking death
alone in their lover’s cave.

Let us now mark the points where the classic religions come to-
gether. All religions, to begin with, lengthen man^s time perspective:
they bid him pay attention to more than the vanishing moment and
the passing years. Sometimes, as with the Jews, religion emphasizes
long biological continuities: it promises that the injustices or frus-
trations of the single individual’s lifetime will be redeemed by the

COSMOS AND PERSON

further history of his tribe or his species on earth; or, with a sounder
naturalism, it notes that the sins of the parents may be visited upon
the children, even unto the third and fourth generation. In other civili-
zations, as with the Egyptian, time passes into eternity and the receding
perspective of the dark, halls of death occupy the imagination more
than the lighted antechamber of life: the finiteness and frailty of the
individual life is thus counterpoised by a cult of the after-life: a life
whose quality is supposedly determined, at the day of judgment, by
the character of one’s behavior on earth. In this version, developed
further by Christianity and Islam, all the individual’s actions are pre-
paratory and incomplete: without immortality, according to this creed,
life on earth would lack significance or adequate compensation for its
evils and injustices.

Such an indefinite prolongation of life, one may remark in passing,
would paradoxically bring to an end the very conditions of life that
set it off from brute matter: life eternal is in fact a contradiction in
terms. But religion’s repeated insistence upon eternity and immor-
lalily must have had, in the earlier stages of human development, a
salutary practical effect: for this attempt to give the individual life a
cosmic perspective offsets the natural foreshortening of time that takes
place under biological pressures and passions, when man is tempted
to sacrifice his true destiny for minor immediate goods: greedily to
prefer his present mess of pottage to his birthright. ‘‘Leave now to
dogs and apes: man has forever.” Those words of Browning’s sum
up the very essence of tlie religious view of lime; and most of man’s
durable achievements rest on that foundation.

For man, future potentialities are present realities; indeed Mowrer
has experimentally demonstrated that “the essence of integrated be-
havior is the capacity to bring the future into the psychological pres-
ent.” One cannot doubt, on the evidence of history, that a certain
degree of detachment from momentary impulses and short-term gains
is essential for human development. For one to do his best in a situa-
tioq whose outcome he cannot surely predict or wholly by his own
efforts determine, or for one to perform the necessary duty of the
moment, though tliat duty is an unrewarding or positively repulsive
one, demanding heavy sacrifices, it is necessary for him to widen his
time boundaries: to act as if he were in fact immoital. That discipline
was morejmportant for man’s development than a more realistic in-
terpretation that would have denied the possibility of immortality
in any kindred and comforting earthly form. Whether this sense of

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

time was bestowed through the cult of family, as with the Chinese
or the Jews, or through the hope of personal survival, as with the
Zoroastrians, the Manichees, the Christians, and the Moslems, it be-
stows on each individual episode a new significance, making it part
of an indefinitely prolonged hereafter.

The religious cycle of time is a cosmic cycle: it embraces centuries,
millennia, eons. That telescopic view both diminishes the claims of
the individual moment and enlarges its ultimate significance. Such a
view contrasts with the sacrilegious American jibe: ‘‘Wliy should we
do anything for posterity? When has posterity ever done anything
for us?” In religion, the time that signifies most is the time tliat can-
not be measured: the place that counts most is tliat which is never
seen. When those convictions are uppermost, man’s purposes embrace
the greatest range of possibilities and can make the most of them.

Besides this orientation to the timeless, religion brings with it the
practice of constant reference, not to man’s works and days and habi-
tations alone, but to the cosmic whole. If this is not true of the more
primitive religions, with their localized deities and tlieir narrow thea-
ter of operations, confined to a river valley or a city, it remains for
the most part an essential characteristic of the higher religions. On
this interpretation, religion presented in mythic terms, long before
biology began to trudge slowly over the same ground, the image of
the great web of life: the interdependence and mutual support of all
living creatures, with the further dependence of life itself upon the
sun and possibly even remoter cosmic energies. Hinduism has per-
haps the deepest and richest insight into these universal kinships
and co-operations: it was not by accident that a Hindu physicist,
Jagadis Bose, not merely measured the sensitivity of plants but dis-
covered the first traces of response in metals.

The fabts of mutual aid and of man’s total involvement in the uni-
verse were first outlined by religion; and this outline has only been
confirmed in essentials by the multiplicity of details and the rich
palette of colors with which the sciences, during the last three cen-
turies, have filled in the blank spaces. Man is, in fact, the microcosm
that religion first conceived him to be: he is involved in a long inter-
play of processes which reaches from the distant sources of cosmic
rays to the innermost recesses of man’s soul, from the widest stretches
of time and space to the sensorium in which the universe is, in sym-
bolic form, reflected and transformed.

COSMOS AND PERSON

No less important than its orientation to the whole is religion’s sense
of the sacredness of life. To the act of fertilization, the begetting of a
new life, religion in its primitive stages correctly attaches a profound
value: an age tliat makes free with contraceptives loses that sense at
its peril. In the magnification of the phallus and the female organ,
the magic transmission of strength and potency, the deliberate culti-
vation, in the corn rituals that underlie so much of the higher religions,
of the moment of sexual abandon and surrender, when union is
achieved symbolically through eating and drinking the body of one’s
God — in all these terms religion proclaims the sacredness of sex, as the
source of life’s own continuity, and as the organic creative act that
lies at the base of man’s remoter creative acts.

Sometimes religion’s magic prescriptions record the fear of this
power as well as the impulse to worship it; witness the frequent put-
ting away of the menstruating woman, not merely as unclean but as
uncanny, and so inimical. Sometimes it attaches to the sexual act it-
self a special religious value, as in the dedication of a whole class
of women, in many religions, from that of Ishtar to her Hindu equiva-
lents, to temple prostitution. For tliese early cults, sterility was a
curse and a punishment: potency and fertility were themselves attri-
butes of godhead. Horus and Osiris: Isis and Serapis: Cybele, the
Great Mother and her lover: Dionysus, god of corn and wine, who
rouses his followers to sexual frenzy and abandon: in all these myth-
ical representations the essential sacredness of sex, as a universal
power, not to be lightly held, was made manifest. Man’s sexuality per-
vades his whole life; and under various metamorphoses and sublima-
tions it spreads through the higher religions, taking many forms, from
that of Mithra and tlie Bull to the Virgin Mary. The mysteries of
generation lie at the gateway to religious explanations of man’s lot
and destiny; and the rites of marriage and birth, or the countervail-
ing rites of abstention and withdrawal from the duties of procreation,
become attached to the religious conception of man’s role and even
to the possibilities of divinity; for it is out of sex, in the dual roles
assumed by the passionate lovers and the compassionate parents, that
the gospel of love itself was bom. Here ecstasy and union: there de-
tachment and sacrifice.

But the sense of the sacredness of life comes from another source,
too: the crisis of death. Man is the only creature in whom the antici-
pation of death alters his present actions, and in whom the memory
of the dead lingers so powerfully as to haunt his dreams and invade

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

liis working moments, frequently with images of overpowering con-
creteness. In some sense, the dead are still alive; yet the living like-
wise must partake of death even before their life reaches its natural
terminus.

Long before Socrates observed that the task of philosophy is to
prepare one for death, religion made this its chief concern. Not merely
did the early religious cults care for the dead body; but they sought
to circumvent the finality of the soul’s departure by providing it sym-
bolically with the means of sustenance on its long journey; while out
of that journey into the unknown itself they conjured up many homely
comforting details, and released, at the final destination, all the de-
sires for bliss that life itself had denied: not least of course the desire
of those who have found happiness, that life should have no ending.
The historic date for the appearance of these brave fantasies can be
fixed in at least one civilization; for in Egypt we can follow the ex-
tension of what was at first the special privilege of immortality from
the Pharaoh, as the first real person, and a manifestation of his god,
to his court favorites, and finally, by a steady process of extension
to people of lesser rank. This mode of democratization did not,
perhaps, become quite free from restrictions till the advent of Chris-
tianity, when the same consummation was offered, for good conduct
and timely repentance, to every human soul, slave or free.

Now this affirmation of death often led, as in Egypt, to a serious
sacrifice of the claims of the living. The building of tombs depleted
wealth and energy that might have improved the life of men in cities.
In what sense, then, has that orientation been an affirmation of the
sacredness of life?

ThQ answer is not far to seek. If life prospered in all its manifes-
tations, the pleasure principle might well dominate it: out of an over-
flow of sexual exuberance, the beautiful forms of life, forever caress-
ing and embracing and conceiving, would swarm through existence
as they do on the w’'alls of the Ajanta caves. But there are in fact many
desolate negative moments in life, observable even in its most fortu-
nate stretches. The de-building principle is at work, along with the
creative, at every moment of man’s existence: his life is in fact a
series of little deaths, and it is out of man’s experience of illness, in-
jury, depletion, corruption, that religion dramatizes its final negation,
death itself, and affirms as real and significant that which seems to
deny the reality of life and destroy its significance.

COSMOS AND PERSON

Man needs no special schooling to embrace life, when it emanates
in health, energy, erotic love, joyful dilation and expansion: when ihe
juices flow harmoniously, he ‘‘who knows, as the long day goes, that
to live is happy has found his heaven.’’ But there is another side to
life, no doubt over-stressed in times of trouble, but too blandly over-
looked in the optimistic utilitarian and romantic philosophies of the
last century: the negative pole of existence, just as real as the positive
pole, particularly on the descending curve of life. This part of life
must be faced and embraced too: an arduous discipline.

By the time men reach middle age, even the seemingly fortunate
have some inkling of this experience; for illness, the impairment of
bodily organs, or psychic disintegration come in some degree sooner
or later to all men: so too with the loss of one’s friends and neighbors
or the death of one’s beloved — all recurrent events in human exist-
ence. Death comes to every household. No Shakespearean apothecary,
no unctuous mortician in the Hollywood style, can heal those ills.
Often the worst of these evils have nothing whatever to do with one’s
individual deserts: Job and Oedipus both bear witness to this fact.

Since man cannot evade these negations and irrationalities, reli-
gion affirms their final significance. By bringing death consciously
back into daily life, the religious mind gives a positive role to the
most dismaying conditions in man’s existence. Here is the essential
explanation, I believe, of religion’s apparently perverse concentra-
tion, as upon an aching tooth that cannot be removed, on sin and sor-
row and pain and death. No liberalism in theology can liberate one
from these profound encounters with the forces that limit and curtail
life, threatening it with utter defeat: sooner or later some scheme of
redemption or transcendence must be proposed.

When vitality runs high, death takes men by surprise. But if they
close their eyes to this possibility, what they gain in peace they lose
in sensibility and significance; and not least, they then leave them-
selves unarmed for more serious encounters and more dire defeats.
One of the classic missions of religion, accordingly, is to search for
values in that part of existence which man, in his purely animal pre-
occupations, would turn away from, as almost all other animals in-
curiously turn away from their own dead. Anticipating the fact of
death, never losing sight of it, religion restores to the person a sense
of his true condition; and when he reaches the downward curve of
life, it helps make the spirit ready to accept its fate with resignation,

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

if not with positive hope. Only those who face these negations reach
maturity.

Humility, sacrifice, detachment, like faith, hope, and charity, must
count among the theological virtues: they belong to the waning phase
of life, as pride, generation, and attachment belong to the waxing
phase. Man often reaches his best understanding of the ultimate pur-
pose of life when he finds himself in a situation where he must will-
ingly choose his own death or accept that of the one he most dearly
loves. Yet for the parent, for example, whose young child has gal-
lantly lost his life trying to rescue a drowning playmate, that deeply
painful moment will forever count as one of life’s true consolations:
too sacred for bitterness.

5 : SACRIFICE Am DETACHMENT

If death is the ultimate gauge of religious belief, sacrifice is its
chief representative in the sphere of action. To determine how much
we value an object, we must ask: How much are we ready to give
up for it? If it goes to the root of our being there may come a moment
when we are ready to give up everything.

To modern man, for the last few centuries, sacrifice has seemed a
primitive and repulsive act, a form of devil worship as Herbert Spen-
cer put it: how infantile to offer one’s God seasonal fruits and liba-
tions, or present one’s precious child to the fiery furnace of Moloch!
Those who live, as they fancy, guided by the dry light of science,
contemn these irrational practices: yet we have gods of our own that
are no less exacting. As an offering to the god of Speed, the American
people sacrifice more than thirty thousand victims every year. With
such a record, we can hardly afford to look with such cold repugnance
on allegedly more primitive practices. But when, after severe examina-
tion, we find that a particular sacrifice is justified in our own con-
science, we become aware of its religious significance. For there are
moments when our self-respect would be undermined if we failed to
make the sacrifice. In the very nature of existence we shall find a
basis for this ritual and this value.

Human life in all its phases seems to flourish best when some re-
strictive pressure is exerted against its aimless proliferation, just as
a garden must be weeded and thinned to produce a richer growth, a
fuller efflorescence. In nature this pressure seems provided by the
struggle for existence; but with the increase of mutual aid and the

COSMOS AND PERSON

tendency to form harmonious organic partnerships, the highest forms
of life must find within themselves some equivalent principles of re-
striction. Man is a creature whose appetites, if otherwise uncurbed,
would grow by what they feed on: with every further satisfaction, his
needs become more imperious: so that what was once an occasional
luxury too easily, under prosperous circumstances, becomes a daily
necessity. If he had no means of releasing himself from this tendency,
man would forfeit his ■ freedom and with the resulting sad satiety
would lose the capacity for further development. Here religion, with
the rise of civilization — ^that is, an ample food supply and a secure
life — pointed the way, through deliberate sacrifice, to further growth
and renewal.

In its minor forms, sacrifice consists of fasts, abstentions, renuncia-
tion of customary pleasures and indulgences, acts that both mortify
the body and discipline the soul, tightening the reins on the lower
functions and giving the lead to the higher ones. These religious ef-
forts bear so many resemblances to the exercises used for making a
soldier capable of facing hardship and obeying without question com-
mands from those above him in rank, that Tertullian, in his preach-
ments on the Christian way of life, drew constantly upon military prece-
dents for apt figures. Our Western society is now so conscious of the
neurotic perversions that may lurk in asceticism that it has overlooked
its general prevalence in our own society, particularly in those de-
partments where its advances have been most conspicuous. But, as I
pointed out in Technics and Civilization, it was primarily a religious
ascetic practice, shaped in the Benedictine monasteries, that brought
.forth the new conception of the disciplined capitalist man, schooled
to regular hours of work, capable of exercising what had been once a
slave’s devotion to regular and monotonous tasks. Passing from the
monastery to the scholar’s study and the government office,, this- disci-
pline eventually became a minimal requirement for business men,
administrators, scientists: no matter what their other human failings,
the capacity for intense application to the job in hand has given these
functionaries no small measure of the dignity and power they enjoy.
Savage peoples are notoriously incapable of this sort of life-negating
abstention, but it is equally true that no merely Epicurean philosophy,
however advanced the civilization, could produce this new ideal type.

In certain religions, unfortunately, the doctrine of sacrifice and de-
tachment from organic needs and vital cravings becomes an end in
itself: this leads ultimately to the complete negation of life one finds

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

in early Buddhism. Buddha taught that life, from its beginning at
birth, brings suffering. This suffering springs out of the libido itself:
all sensations, all feelings, all impulses and appetites, lead men to
pain and grief, so that the mass of men, by the very gift of life, are
drowned in misery, while even the most fortunate, whose head is
temporarily above water, will sooner or later be swallowed by the
same flood.

For the relief of this condition Buddhism had a simple prescription:
fetter the senses, curb one’s animal impulses, reduce all forms of
craving! By drying up life at its source, one lessens the daily flow of
misery. This is the doctrine of. total sacrifice: the whole is forfeited
in order to control the part. But actually, if life were as inherently
and chronically subject to miscarriage as Buddhism proclaimed, why
should one respect the taboo against suicide? The only perfect cure
for this disease would be to kill the patient: mere halfway measures
savor of superstition and cowardice. Respecting the will-to-live too
deeply to challenge this taboo. Buddhism sought to redeem man from
life, not for life.

To hold with Schopenhauer, the most consistent Western reinter-
preter of Buddha’s view, that ‘%e denial of the will to live is the
way of redemption” is to turn the world into a penal colony: the self-
imposed starvation of every organ would become the only means of
release. No doctrine of sacrifice and detachment that so challenges the
innate will-to-live can hope to keep its hold on the human spirit: for
if it is not, at any particular moment, untrue to the grim facts of life,
we know in our hearts that it is untrue to its potentialities.

That is why in history Buddhism preserved itself, happily, through
a long series of “corruptions”; against logic, these backslidings once
more placed Buddhism on the side of life, binding its followers to
their earthly lot by an elaborate ritual and an esthetic effulgence which,
so far from denying their mortal appetites, tempted them with ever
more sensuous and joyous fare.

In the long-time perspective of religion, it becomes plain that only
through the practice of sacrifice and the discipline of detachment can
man accept, without overwhelming despair, the facts of his own cor-
ruptibility and death. When man has not schooled himself by such
practices, when he fosters in himself the illusion that he holds life
on his own terms and may expand without limit, he is in no mood to
confront the tragic terms of his own existence.

COSMOS AND PERSON

Once achieved, the practice of sacrifice brings a special compensa-
tion: the kind of release that comes directly to those who have under-
gone an ordeal and who know, having survived it, that they are equal
to all of life’s occasions. Those who accept sacrifice as one of the con-
stant conditions for life’s fulfillment and expression, whether in the
relations of lovers, of parents, of citizens, are well grounded in the
objective conditions under which communities and persons actually
flourish. No serious work has ever been done in the world without
giving up a large part of what men rightly think valuable in daily
living: no higher development was ever achieved without renouncing
many of tlie goods that gave one satisfaction on a lower plane. Unless
the great political leader can, at the right moment, give up his politi-
cal power, as Solon did, unless the loving mother can surrender her
child suflSciently to let him follow his own line of growth, the very
resources of power and love necessary to nurture the personality will
also cripple it.

In the long run, all high human achievement demands sacrifice,
since a part of what we do in our present lives will have no fulfill-
ment or completion till such a distant date that it will make little dif-
ference to one’s own happiness or that of one’s immediate descend-
ants. Little efforts may be consummated in the passing hour of the
present generation, but great things usually demand a longer period
for their fruition; indeed, perhaps the most valuable part of our lives
lies in realms that promise least immediate satisfaction. To stand pain,
hardship, deprivation for the sake of such distant consummations is
part of tlie lot of the human race. In teaching this lesson, the higher
religions taught men to accept reality.

Let me sum up. Though life flourishes only by expressing its im-
mediate needs and fulfilling the biological goals of growth and repro-
duction, human beings are able, through the discipline of sacrifice, to
choose courses that lie outside this natural path, and with this choice
a fuller development of the person becomes possible. Sacrifice, in the
religious sense, may be ultimately beneficial to the human community;
but it is not based on any tangible quid pro quo: often what the indi-
vidual, or even the community, gives up will be infinitely more than
what he will get in return. Paradoxically, the more profound the val-
ues attached to the sacrifice, the less likely one is in the end to profit
by the act. When the matter is important enough to warrant the giving
up of life, he who does so gets no earthly reward at all; for who would
be so foolish as to count his posthumous medals? But the capacity to

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

make that decision and to act on those terms has its own special justi-
fication: it brings one face to face with the divine in human existence.
‘^‘Indifferent to .gain or loss, prepare for battle.” Those words of
Krishna to Arjiina in the Bhagavad-Gita count among the ultimate
words of wisdom; they repeat, with their special accent, the more fa-
miliar words of the New Testament: “Wliosoever loseth his life, the
same shall find it.”

When tliat thought and attitude w^ere first formulated, a new person
was conceived, and a new form of society became possible. We shall
presently trace some of these consequences.

6: RELIGlON^S POSITIVE FUNCTIONS

At this point, it may be well to summarize briefly the paradoxical
functions of religion. Religion proclaims the sacredness of life and
attempts to further man’s insight into his own development. Spreading
its net so wide that it hauls in the ugly monsters of superstition and
many of the commonplace fish of daily life, religion also includes in
its catch the rare flying fish of divinity, the possession of which, even
for a moment, somehow exorcises the blind fury of Moliy Dick.

In the early cycle of culture, religion overcomes the foolish con-
ceits of barbarous vitality, by confronting man wuth his tragic des-
tiny; but in the later phases of the cycle, when the attachment to life
tends to weaken, then religion performs tlie function Henri Bergson
ascribes to it: it defends man “against the representation by the in-
telligence of the inevitability of death.” Likewise religion protects him
against his over-reacting to the sad discovery that there is a constant
hiatus between his plans and their day-to-day fulfillment, in a world
where man’s will and purpose are far from being supreme. Finally,
religion gives man a sense of permanence and rationality in a world
of flux, accident, seemingly demonic caprice.

On the animal level, the world contains no mysteries, though it may
hold many surprises. The animal’s understanding is adequate to his
environment: the last thing he would be capable of grasping is the
fact that his environment is beyond his grasp. Not so with man. Reli-
gion leaches men systematically what his dawning intelligence prompts
him to suspect, that there are forces beyond his control, time beyond
his reckoning, space beyond his reach, mysteries beyond his very
ability to formulate the problems that arise from them. In short, the
real world is other than what man’s naive animal needs have made

COSMOS AND PERSON

it out to be. In the light of that interpretation, solid rocks become
transitory and diaphanous and what seemed the passing shimmer of a
dream may last longer than a granite cornerstone.

By centering part of man’s attention on insoluble problems, reli-
gious thought has schooled man to look below the surface of things:
the deeper he looks, the more effectively, in the end, he acts. Long
before modern physics, high religion detached itself from tlie illu-
sions of materialism: so, too, its faith in a rational order pervading
the universe gave man the confidence to search for nature’s regulari-
ties and laws.

These great contributions also define religion’s limitations. None of
its concepts offers a causal explanation of any event: it deals with
reasons, purposes, designs — not causes. Many religious intuitions have
proved but childish sketches that anticipated, but could not replace,
the methodical photography of science. Where orderly observation and
systematic measurement are possible in dealing with the nature of
man, the traditional descriptions of religion must be supplemented
with the causal interpretation of science. But the kernel of religious
consciousness is a profound sense of the nature and meaning of life
in all its dimensions: an intuition of the whole. In every religious
myth, from that of Kali the destroyer to that of Jesus, the Good Shep-
herd, there is a true indication of some portion of man’s experience
and aspiration that no causal description, from the outside, can nullify,
or, for that matter, do without.

In the pervasive forms of animism and magic, religious conscious-
ness has doubtless superstitiously served many factitious interests and
local needs: but it has remained a central activity of man because it
relates, ultimately, to that which is central in all existence; and if
every shrine were effaced, every Church destroyed, every dogma ob-
literated, every superstition buried, it would still occupy this place and
perform this special function. The heightened consciousness of what
lies beyond our immediate present state, in space and time, was the
specific contribution of the classic religions. To act in terms of that
consciousness is to acknowledge that no act exists for the actor alone:
not even that which seems most private and inviolate.

Religion, then, is the sphere of the sacred : the ultimate wonder and
mystery of all existence as mirrored in the living consciousness of
man. From this standpoint, a single cycle of life in the tiniest of or-
ganisms discloses something about the nature of the entire cosmic
process that a whole eon of stellar evolution, without that stir of life,

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

would not reveal; while what is relatively even a moment of signifi-
cant consciousness in the life of man, transforms him from a mere
speck lost in an almost boundless universe, into a progressively bound-
less mind, capable of devouring that universe. Where sentience, feel-
ing, and thought exist the dumb universe has found a spokesman and
its blind forces a commander.

This view of religion, needless to say, differs in essential features
from all of the existing orthodoxies. While it upholds many of the
divinations and revelations of the classic religions, it does not attribute
factual truth to their mythologies or any finality to their dogmas.

In all humility the present philosophy affirms as persistent that
which every system of revelation tends to coyly modify or arrogantly
deny: the continued existence of mystery itself. Whether we consider
God in the orthodox form as the boundless Being that encompasses
all existence, or as the emergent divinity that realizes the purposes
and potencies that otherwise remain only latent in existence, this view
holds that religion has no special key to the character and nature of
God. In that, we accept the classic Hindu refusal to define God: Neti^
neti: that is to say, Not, Not . . . Not Yet.

So, though the presence of ‘^God” and the possibility of communion
with ‘‘God” rest on a great mass of human testimony, what it is that
is so felt and communed with is not open to external inspection or
objective assessment: it can only be experienced and that experience
lends itself to diverse interpretations. William James, testing the in-
fluence of certain drugs and anestlietics and awakening from a nitrous
oxide dream, felt triumphantly that he held at last the key to the uni-
verse. But he found that the precious sentence in which all wisdom
seemed concentrated became, as soon as he awakened, sheer nonsense.
That is one possibility. At the other extreme, it is conceivable that a
person who has the experience of encountering God and being lifted
above all human levels by his presence has found a natural way of
widening the field of his responses; so that forces that have as little
to do with his conscious animal existence as, say, the cosmic ray, find
a path to consciousness that is usually blocked.

On those terms, the resulting sense of illumination and ecstasy
might make more life-limited forms of consciousness seem paltry:
that indeed is what the great mystics have felt and taught. Even such
a resolute agnostic as Dr Horace Kallen has confirmed this intuition
of the divine by personal experiment. To seek such ecstasy directly
would be as worthy of human effort as to seek it in the more tangible

COSMOS AND PERSON

mediums of painting or music, which also have the possibility of seiz-
ing and transporting the receptive soul. Are not many of the cere-
monies of religion an attempt to use the conventional vehicles of art
to achieve the direct sense of this divine communion? Unfortunately,
to attach the word ^‘God” to this experience does not in any sure sense
define it or give one a more intelligible account of the nature of di-
vinity . . . Neti, neti . . .

If this interpretation differs from that of the theologians, it differs
no less from the explanations offered by the so-called advanced minds
of the recent past: the eighteenth century rationalists, with their con-
viction that religion was a tissue of superstitions, framed by cunning
priests for their selfish ends; or the nineteenth century “scientific”
view, which rejected even the possibility of a pragmatically useful
superstition and regarded religion as a sort of tumor on the brain of
reason and science. If religion were as accidental and insignificant as
this, it would be an exception to every other institution: indeed, it
would so extravagantly defy our current systems of explanation that
no scientific mind would rest easy till it had gotten to the bottom of
this anomaly.

Here the burden of proof rests rather with the doubter. Even on
limited biological terms, a practice embedded in the history of the
race must have some value. If man has so long concerned himself
with the cosmic and the sacred and the mysterious, as a guide to his
immediate plan of life, the likelihood is that this concern is a re-
warding, life-sustaining quest. There are other parallels to guide judg-
ment here; for the race has often had a dumb persistent feeling that
some field of activity was important long before man has found a prac-
ticable means for exploiting it. Take the dream of the transmutation
of the elements. For ages that dream haunted man irrationally; at the
end of the Middle Ages in Europe the alchemists, becoming more
feverish in their quest, even resorted to acts of deliberate charlatan-
ism, such as concealing gold pellets in their crucible, in order to have
the false, subjective gratification, if not the actual triumph, of achiev-
ing it. On the basis of long observation of the stability of the elements,
there was little hope that this dream could be realized: indeed, the
more knowledge accumulated, up to a point, the more baseless it
seemed. Forty years ago, no one doubted that ninety-two elements,
no more or less, existed, though not all of them had yet been brought
to light. But let us now admit the facts: the fantastic dream of trans-
mutation was closer to the nature of things than the scientific prudence

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

and common sense that denied it. We have seen the fooFs gold of
alchemy become the minted sovereign of nuclear physics.

Thus it may turn out with religion: above all, with the special hope
of the high religions for enlarging the sphere of the divine, for trans-
muting humanity into divinity at some far-off moment. The formulas
that the Churches have employed for bringing about this change are
doubtless as clumsily empirical, as willfully superstitious, as practi-
cally futile, as those of the alchemists — though even here one must
qualify this dismissal by remembering that the alchemists chose lead
as their favorite element for transmutation: a selection from the right
compartment of the periodic table. Certainly, no one can examine the
role of religion in historic societies without recalling how often the
religious impulse itself has miscarried, and how resistant human ways
and institutions have been to the radical changes in man’s nature which
religion has proposed. But these failures must be set beside many
genuine gains: for, as the distinguished anthropologist, Dr A. L.
Kroeber, has pointed out, the classic religions have done much to trans-
form the infantilism of primitive man; and there is little doubt that
human development has gone on most fully and rapidly in those civili-
zations where a higher religious consciousness has pervaded at least
an enlightened minority.

On this view, then, religion is no bedraggled survival from the past,
soon to be completely discarded through the advance of positive sci-
ence, Traditional religion will, rather, be the source of fresh muta-
tions, proceeding from older formulas to more active methods of in-
vestigation, experiment, self-observation, utilizing aspects of life and
personality that science too long has disdained.

Religion concerns itself with the reaction of man in his wholeness
to the whole that embraces him. Instead of abandoning religion as
science extends the province of objective description, we must rather
increase its scope, so that our subjective contributions will be as ade-
quate and as disciplined as our objective descriptions. The despiritual-
ization of the world — ^the withdrawal of projections, as Jung calls it —
has not brought us closer to reality, but has shut out that aspect of
reality which only the fully developed human person with a rich sub-
jective life can cope with. As a result of this process, we have not sim-
ply undermined our sense of the divine: we have rather embraced it
in an inverted and debased form by giving a fuller scope to the
demonic. When the god in him is repressed, the half-gods and devils
take possession of man. We have seen that happen in our day, in

COSMOS AND PERSON

countries that have too confidently paraded their science and oh-
jectmty.

Religion re-establishes man where he belongs in the scale of sig-
nificance: at the very center of the universe he consciously embraces
and interprets. Without excessive pride, we may still nourish the hope
diat one day man will d scover a more viable way than even the saints
have yet found to nourish and enlarge the province of the divine. What
man still finds within him only at rare moments he may yet project
and establish in the world outside: the beginning if not the cLple-
tion of the Kingdom of Heaven. ^

CHAPTER IV. THE TRANSFORMATIONS

OF MAN

1: THE BIRTH OF THE PERSON

Various classic religions and philosophies anticipated the current
discovery tliat man has two natures: a primitive or original nature,
conditioned by his biological inheritance, and a socially acquired na-
ture, shaped by his history and his culture, not least by his aspira-
tions and anticipations. Apart from earliest infancy man’s original
nature never becomes visible except as it is clothed in its social at-
tributes; for one of man’s deepest natural characteristics, as essential
to him as the hive-building habits of bees, is his impulse to fabricate
and transmit a culture. By this means he not only communicates with
his kind and interprets every fresh experience, but modifies his own
capacities. He must make himself more than an animal, if he is not
to fall below the level of any beast.

As a product of nature, whose past links him with other animal
species, whose present condition unites him in complicated ecological
partnerships, making him dependent upon even the bacteria and the
molds, man’s work is plainly laid down for him. Breathe or die! Drink
or die! Eat or die! Reproduce or die! Work together or die! These
alternatives hold as strictly for him as they do for all the rest of the
animal kingdom; and so a large part of his existence must be dedi-
cated to carrying out these functions: the physiological cycles of nu-
trition, growth, and repair, of ovulation, fertilization, and reproduc-
tion account for immense areas of human activity, and leave such a
profound impression that they even color remoter spheres of his cul-
ture. On the basis of these animal needs, man builds his culture: elab-
orating in more playful forms the imperious demands of nature.

By the slow accretion of symbols and technical facilities, of customs
and ceremonies and rituals, man builds upon the environment he
shares with other animals a more artful nature, one he has made more
truly his own. If habit becomes “second nature” culture is mainly

transmitted habit. The biological differences between the major races

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN

of mankind are few, compared to the diJfferences that exist between
cultures: for each culture, even if primitive, tied closely to natural
conditions and limited in area, tends to become an almost self-con-
tained world, set apart from each other little self-contained world. So
dearly won are the achievements of culture, that, once a departure has
been made, it tends for long periods to become sacrosanct. ''We ob-
serve our ancient customs,” an Eskimo head-man said to Rasmussen,
"so that the universe may be preserved.” The comfort that children
find in the repetition of a familiar story, or the discomfort they show
when a familiar ritual is thoughtlessly omitted, only carries into the
present the attitude of primitive man toward the ways of his tribe. So
the stereotypes of social habit, though different from those of nature,
tend all too soon to become as fixed, rigid, hostile to further change
and development. Bergson, in Two Sources of Morality and Religion,
has well described the static, immobile, self-preservative culture of
tribe and nation.

Once a group has achieved a certain level of culture, its life tends
to relapse into a static and repetitive pattern, undergoing changes only
in response to outward pressures, coming either from fluctuations in
climate and in food supply, or the insurgent activities of other tribes,
encroaching on home territory: whence the old proverb, that dates
back at least to Heraclitus, that war is the father of change. For the
greater part of history, the main source of recent cultural changes,
namely mechanical invention, operated only at rare intervals and with
great slowness : tens of thousands of years passed before the Old Stone
Age, with its hunting economy, gave place to the New Stone Age,
marked by the domestication of animals and plants. In the more primi-
tive cultures, man’s nature remained almost as limited, as conditioned
by the characteristics of his immediate group, as incapable of pro-
jecting higher levels for development, as the animal species them-
selves: for all of life’s insurgence and adventure, the whole course of
organic development is marked by a series of enclosures and arrests:
in human culture no less than in nature.

But at a particular moment of history, a transformation at length
takes place. This has proved almost as radically important for man’s
higher development as his original invention of language. He seeks a
new kind of self, organically conditioned by his biological and social
roles, and yet to a certain degree released from them: directed toward
a path of development that lies beyond mere racial continuity and tribal
survival. By an inner reorientation, man detaches himself from the fate

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

of his local group: he becomes part of a more universal society, at
first merely an imagined one, and by means of new insights and pur-
poses, he transcends the frustrations of his historic experience and an
earthbound community.

One may call this process the birth of the person. Its significance
lies in the fact that it makes possible the eventual emergence of united
humanity, no longer separated by impassable cultural walls: individ-
uation and unity thus go hand in hand. With this change, man loosens
his ties with blood and soil, which bound him to his limited past: all
other men become his brothers, the world becomes his home, and the
inner transformations of the person take precedence over the shocks
and challenges and chance stimuli that come from outer circumstances
alone. First he is earth-conditioned: then group-conditioned: still
largely the passive product of nature and culture. Finally, he achieves
self-direction and propels himself toward a universal community.

Even today this transformation has not yet been widely achieved,
though it has been the major effort of the classic religions for the last
three thousand years. Let us look at this process more closely; for
it has long resisted interpretation: even the best recent descriptions,
those of Bergson and Toynbee, have been vitiated by their over-sharp
distinction between the tribal and the universal, between the self wholly
conditioned by the immediate culture and tlie transcendent self that is
released from its local attachments and is part of a more universal so-
ciety. Yet the change is in fact a profound one; for it adds to the
human character something not given, except in a latent form, in
either nature or culture — ^the glimpse of higher pinnacles of develop-
ment, in and through and ultimately beyond the person.

So far from being at the end of this development, we may, with
the further advance of science, be only at the beginning of a much
wider transformation. But to be ready for such departures we must
first examine the process that gave rise to the universal religions —
beginning perhaps with the abortive effort of Ikhnaton in Egypt to
found a world religion under the Sun God, Aton.

2: TEE UNIVERSAL MASK

The change I seek to interpret seems to occur at a crucial moment in
civilization. Sometimes that change is embodied in myths, and at other
moments, it leaves behind its own record, marred by torn or missing

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN

pages but still largely decipherable: the Confucian Analects or the
New Testament. Up to this point, each member of the community has
no part to play except as a subordinate, often specialized, member of
the group as a whole: he must obey its laws, and still more strictly,
follow its customs on penalty of severe punishment, sometimes even
death: its taboos, however irrational, are inviolate, and its gods, how-
ever brutal, are unchallengeable. In so far as this community has a
mind, it is a common one: the new Chinese character for the generic
term, group — man-sheep — applies to all tribal communities even when,
as in the great river valleys of the Indus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, or
the Nile they reach the complex interdependencies of civilization. Al-
ready, perhaps, there is a glimmer of the potentialities of the person,
even in the most backward tribes: but if so, it is confined to the local
god: the attributes of autonomy, self-transformation, selectivity, free-
dom do not as yet belong to any being except the god, or his symbolic
representative in the community, the Pharaoh or Emperor.

Suddenly — for the first steps in the transformation occur within
the span of an individual life — a person detaches himself from the
community. He singles himself out from the mass by reason of the
fact that he no longer paints his face or tattoos his skin with the typ-
ical patterns of the tribe. He is no longer a Babylonian or an Egyptian
or an Assyrian: no longer an Eskimo or a Bantu or a Maya: no longer
even visibly a Yellow Man or a White Man or a Black Man. He be-
longs in fact to a new and singular species that has never hitherto had
a local habitation: he is a person. In him the natural man experiences
rebirth and enters into a fuller inheritance than that of his race or
tribe.

The usual questions that one asks about the older forms of man are
no longer relevant: What tribe do you belong to and what land do you
come from? Who are your parents, your brothers and sisters, your
other kinsmen? What is your vocation, your rank and status? What
language do you speak: what food do you eat? Yes, this person comes
from a tribe, but all the markings have grown fainter; yes: he has
sisters and brothers, but he has turned his back on them: he still loves
the place where he was nurtured, but the wide world has become his
home. He has a vocation, too; is a shepherd, a carpenter, a tent-maker,
a lens-grinder; but he purposes to found a new kind of guild, based —
to use Fichte’s phrase — on the Vocation of Man. This creator of a
universally human mode of feeling and thinking and behaving first

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

announces himself by stripping off the symbols of his local culture: in
his very nakedness he seems a monster, and in his innocence a cheat.
But he leaves on a few open minds an impression so singular they
never forget it: they have at last seen a Man. With this avatar of uni-
versal Man, this second birth, a new stage of development opens for
humanity at large.

What attracts men to this new type of person? — he who urges them
to leave their familiar paths in the fertile valleys of life, and climb,
with constant effort, with hazard-tempting skill, often facing mortal
danger, up to the rocky pinnacles and the ice-clad summits, where
finally the climber himself is the only representative of life? Why do
men dream, even for a moment, that his way is a better way than their
way, and that the lonely climb, with no promise of a safe return, will
yield a higher reward than three solid meals, a soft bed, and a warm
fire in the ancestral village below?

The reason should be evident, for the greatest of all human rewards
is surely not animal satiety: therefore not health, not wealth, not lux-
ury: not a multiplicity of sexual partners or an endless procession of
feasts, all followed by drowsy oblivion. The greatest reward is a sense
of possibilities above this lowland existence: the inner strength that
spurns security: the vision one achieves only from the heights, after
the hard effort of the climb. Because the new prophet represents, in
excess, the highest but weakest side of man’s nature, he exercises a pe-
culiar fascination over his fellows. This weak side, even at the lowest
human level, has already helped him to emerge from his grubby ani-
mal necessities; but it does not yet dominate them: far from it. Even
to believe in its existence, too often requires a special act of faith:
‘‘Tf anyone was unreal,” observed Henry Adams, himself the product
of a high culture, “it was the poet and not the business man.” He
spoke thus, not merely for his generation, but for the common sensual
man, at all times and everywhere. So fragile is the common faith in
all that gives life the sense of some more ultimate goal than the end-
less cycle of animal necessities.

The new person embodies that faith and confirms it: he speaks from
cosmic as well as human perspectives: on behalf of the timeless, the
unconditioned, the universal. He gives forth new laws that defy those
of the tribe, and outlines new duties that supplant the familiar old
ones: his message flows, like a stream of fresh water from the moun-
tain top, to remove the barnacles of superstition that cling to the
tribal hulk and hamper even its daily sailings. With the cleansing of

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN 97

law and custom, the new self emerges: a self capable of leading a life
not included in the tribal pattern, capable of moving outside the circle
of the tribe or the city and embracing men molded by other earth- 1
forces and social pressures: a self capable finally of detaching itself,
in some degree, from even the most urgent biological needs: renounc-
ing life, yet guarding it and fostering it more watchfully than it had
been fostered and guarded before.

When such a transformation takes place in complete isolation, as
one must assume that it often does, the chances will be against the
survival of either the person or the new way of life. For its successful
establishment the human community itself must be prepared for an
unusual change, for a rebellion against the accepted pattern of life,
by experiencing some unusual series of misfortunes or frustrations.
Unscathed, untroubled, unawakened, no community would be pre-
pared for the new person or be willing to take part in the great changes
that he finally effects. Only out of despair can such hope and such
invincible effort come forth. This new religious consciousness, as
Toynbee has amply demonstrated, takes form almost without excep-
tion in a Time of Troubles; when the familiar gods have deserted the
tribe and the familiar ways of life do not bring their accustomed
rewards.

Yet once the situation is ripe, and once the prophet appears, a
whole series of changes will come about with remarkable swiftness;
and though these changes may bring no improvement in material con-
ditions, men will turn to their familiar tasks with a new sense of di-
rection and purpose: they will model their whole existence on a non-
tribal, non-animalistic plan. So decisive is this transformation that
presently people will proclaim that the process is a supernatural one:
a god has been born!

But a god is not in question. The miracle that takes place is with-
out doubt a true miracle; but the marvel of it is even greater because
it does not in fact depend upon a supernatural agency. Changes that
would be inconceivable through the slow secular modifications of tribal
society, changes so great that they would otherwise need a millennium,
take place in fact, at least the grand outlines emerge, under the im-
pact of the new personality, almost overnight: through this form of
social polarization, every element in the community re-aligns itself as
a group of iron filings re-arrange themselves in a definite pattern once
they are brought within the range of a magnet. But do not be misled
by mythological elaborations: the process itself is a natural one. The

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

new leader need not exercise, or pretend to exercise, omnipotent or
even super-normal powers: certainly, in their own lifetimes, neither
Solon nor Confucius nor Buddha nor Moses nor Mahomet made any
claim to being a God. The magical wonder-working attributes, which
are later imputed to the leader, or even to his relics, are probably
signs of a declining faith, which can no longer credit the natural prop-
erties of the departed leader and feels the need of bridging the in-
creasing psychological distance by a recourse to magical explana-
tions. His followers, inferior to the man, conceal their own littleness
by hiding behind the enlarged figure of a God.

But the real miracle is in fact far more astounding than the healing
of the sick, the raising of the dead, or the moving of mountains: foi
the birth of a universal personality is the equivalent, if not more than
the equivalent, of the sudden appearance of a new species in nature.
Through the creation and incarnation of a universal persona, or mask,
a whole civilization may not merely alter its composite face but deeply
change many other dynamic constituents of its character. By strenuous
discipline and devout imitation, each follower of the new prophet as-
sumes the mask for himself, and in time his own very bones and flesh
begin, as it were, to fill in these ideal outlines: by a second birth he
achieves a nature no less distinctive than that given by his first birth.

We have still much to learn about this whole change. In some ways,
this transformation bears a resemblance to a more common process:
that which takes the raw material one finds in any generation of babies
and, within a short space of years, with the aid of parental training,
social molds, and deliberate educational methods, transforms these
creatures into clerks and bookkeepers, into physicians and inventors,
into farm laborers and mechanics: creatures adapted to many roles
of a most exacting kind, not found in nature or in primitive societies.
The creation of such characters, the assumption of such roles, is a
common secular process: under sufficient stress, we can even take
young men, amiably disposed toward their fellows, used to an easy,
over-protected life, and within a half-year turn them into soldiers,
ready to endure extreme hardship, to kill ruthlessly, to face grievous
injury or death. This last change is, in fact, almost miraculous enough
to be called a conversion: but it lacks the spontaneity, the “catching
quality,” that religious transformation displays.

In sketching this development I but outline a problem. How a per-
son ^^becomes what he at first merely pretends to be,” as Gordon All-
port has pointed out, “is one of the processes dynamic psychology

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN

seeks to explain,” Unfortunately for science, the most revealing ex-
amples of this transformation on a collective scale take place only at
rare moments in history; and our chief knowledge must be derived,
not from this critical handful of major events, but from various paral-
lel manifestations of the process, visible in every developing life,
which take place under far less dramatic and decisive circumstances.
As for the later achievements of a persona, which turn people year
after year into Hindus, Jews, or Christians, they take place under the
slower pressures of custom and habit: the dramatic process of con-
version becomes, at this later stage, far more rare. Yet it is only by
a repetition of the original experience, by incarnation and conversion,
that the original change can keep from lapsing into a social stereotype,
given to vain repetitions and empty rituals, incapable of producing
the freedom, the autonomy, the creativity of the original person.

One need not wonder, then, that it is from the artist that the best
description of the whole creative process has so far come. William
Butler Yeats, in his Autobiography, noted that “there is a relation
between discipline and the theatrical sense. If we cannot imagine our-
selves as different from what we are and assume the second self, we
cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves, though we may accept one
from others. Active virtue, as distinct from the passive acceptance of a
current code, is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wear-
ing of a mask. It is the condition of an arduous full life.” I cannot
improve that description.

With the birth of the illumined person, the ritual of a static culture,
conditioned by its own past, complacently committed to its ingrown
“way of life,” vain of its very weaknesses, turns into an active drama,
whose plot concerns the conflict between its higher aims and claims,
embodied in the person, and its old anxiety to achieve mere security
and survival. Every great religious prophet has been the harbinger
of a more universal way of life, which unites his fellows into a wider
community that ideally encompasses all mankind. In that sense, the
new leader is the individual embodiment of a whole society; and from
his personality, his new attitude, his fresh aims, his daily practices,
not least from little hints he drops by the way without developing
them, the complex activities of a higher society will take form. In time
a discipline and a common system of education will be perfected in
an attempt to carry forward the original miracle of his detachment
and transcendence. Yet the pressures of a closed society will limit the
full scope of this movement: neither Buddhism nor Christianity nor

100

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Islam, the most extensive attempts at unification, has actually encom-
passed more than a small portion of mankind. But the original effort,
even when it stops short of its ideal goal, profoundly alters every in-
stitution; and transfigures every possibility.

This transformation, as I have hinted, has never been satisfactorily
described in all its details, though the data for such a description have
been accumulated by comparative history and anthropology, and much
of it has been conveniently summarized in Toynbee’s magnificent work
of scholarship, A Study of History. If theologians have tended to over-
magnify the more striking moments of this process and to give them
an entirely supernatural cast, the ordinary historian or sociologist has
been tempted simply to ignore it, because his leading concepts and his
method direct his attention to less singular points and less decisive
changes. How could conventional modern scholars describe a change
that takes place, in the first instance, in a single individual, not in a
mass: above all an interior change not verified by substantial contem-
porary documents, a change whose very existence can only be deduced
from its remote consequences? Yet the fact remains that much of this
process is of a social nature: the mask would be unimportant if it
covered only one face.

3 ; THE SOCIAL PROCESS OF CONVERSION

In The Condition of Man I sought to summarize the stages of this
whole transformation from personality to community under the heads
of Formulation, Incarnation, Incorporation, and Embodiment. Here I
shall recapitulate this summary, in order to have a firmer base for
describing the corresponding process in its counter-development in re-
verse: Disembodiment, Alienation, Detachment, Illumination.

The first step in the integration of a more universal person, the step
of formulation, involves a change of ideas and, more deeply, an alter-
ation of feeling, attitude, and expectancy. This change often takes
places on the uppermost level of abstraction: but it eventually brings
new perceptions and intuitions to the actual life-situation. Often in the
early stages, the new attitude hardly even achieves the status of a full-
blown philosophy: it is still too fluid and unformed, too much the
product of solitary illumination: the very words to express it are lack-
ing. For a long time the change of attitude produces no definite ideo-
logical structure, though it may show itself in such arts as are un-
bound by practical exigencies, like painting or music: there is some-

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN

101

thing secret and esoteric in these early manifestations. At their deep-
est levels, they are a wordless sense of fresh potentialities for life.

Consider the coming of Christianity. The ideas of renunciation and
otherworldly fulfillment of a supernal kind were already visible in the
fifth century mystery cults: baptism, initiation, conversion, all were
practiced; and the believer was “saved” by these practices and guar-
anteed an after-life in heaven. Plato had a more philosophic vision of
eternity: but his world of forms complemented the vulgar heaven;
and he, too, participated in the general reorientation toward death:
the new departure. These life-renouncing ideas characterized the phi-
losophies of Antisthenes and Diogenes, and formed the general me-
dium of expression for the world-weariness that took place in the
whole Greco- Judaic world: they had their counterpart in the prac-
tices of the Therapeutae and the Essenes. Seeping into Israel the new
attitude blended with a growing belief in the end of the world and
the coming of the Messiah, so long prophesied in Jewish literature.
Beyond this, currents of Buddhism, transmitted through Alexander the
Great’s conquests, may have re-enforced these native elements.

All these early formulations took place centuries before the ideas
were clarified, deepened, and given a dynamic impetus through the
act of incarnation: for men become susceptible to ideas, not by dis-
cussion and argument, but by seeing them personified and by loving
the person who so embodies them. The prophet must live' the life so
that others may know the doctrine: he hands down the idea in a form
deeper than words to his followers and successors; and they, in turn,
must dramatically install themselves in his role.

Here, in the history of Christianity, Jesus and Paul of Tarsus played
a decisive part. Up to this point, the main ideas of Christianity were
still formless and diffuse. They had given rise to more than one par-
tial incarnation, indeed, to a succession of such incarnations from
Socrates to John the Baptist; even later manifestations, like that of
Mani, were of the same order. But the decisive stage awaited the inner
transformation of Jesus. This came after his lonely vigil in the desert:
he came forth from that ordeal, not merely prophesying that a serious
Time of Troubles was at hand, according to Matthew, but manifesting
in his own person a radical change of interest and attitude. Rising
above concern for temporal kingship and personal survival, Jesus
stressed the new virtues of humility and forbearance and patience: he
treated one’s duty to one’s neighbor as of the same order as self-inter-
est and sought by imaginative insight, through smiling accommoda-

102

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

tion rather than resistance, to transform aggression. By all these means
Jesus created a new basis for human association and a new social
agency for living through and transcending the approaching crisis.
The person thus gained the upper hand over the forces that threat-
ened it.

Now we come to the third stage. The direct effect of the prophet
upon his community is fitful and limited during his lifetime: he
reaches only a handful of disciples; and these, as often as not, are
the weaklings, the rejected ones, the outcasts, who have nothing to
lose* Before he can touch even such people, no small part of his life
has been spent in the process of defining his mission, fitting himself
for it. This self-transformation, incidentally, is so little understood
that a certain biographer of Walt Whitman used the evidence that
describes his second birth as a positive proof of the fact that Whitman
was a mere charlatan. Even among those who come directly under the
prophet’s influence, the faithful handful, the process of rebirth and
renewal takes place slowly, haltingly: the disciples are at first wit-
nesses rather than active participants: if they are fascinated by this
new species of man, they are also full of doubts and resistances and
impulses to betrayal: witness Thomas, Peter, Judas. Moreover, those
who are most desirous of being re-born are not always thoroughly
transformed: even while the master is living they fall away from him,
and though their conversion be ardent, they may not in the end suc-
ceed in changing their ways as fully as they had, in their first gener-
ous espousal, believed possible. Yes: the new mask does not fit easily
over the natural face: indeed, in forcing conformity, it will be the
mask, not the head, that will be changed. For one who stands on the
bank and looks at a swimmer, swimming looks easy; but once the nov-
ice takes to the water himself, he can scarcely make half a dozen
strokes before he sinks: it takes practice as well as faith to be able to
keep one’s head above water. So with this greater change.

To give substance to this new personality, one must do more than
repeat the master’s precepts, capture his gestures, imitate his voice:
the whole routine and discipline of life must in time be altered. Once
the new person appears, once the new plot and theme are outlined,
the stage must be set and special costumes designed for the multitude
of new actors. The rites of sex and marriage, the conduct of economic
life and the administration of government, in the end every social in-
stitution, must be altered so as to support the new person and make
possible his social existence and his participation in all the activities

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN

103

from which, in the first instance, he had withdrawn and had apparently
left behind him.

In short, if the rebirth begins as an inner private change, it must
be confirmed by an outer public one, before the new self can achieve
a universal nature, superimposed on the more limited secular culture.
Until these processes of incorporation and embodiment have taken
place, the new personality will remain unformed, inoperative, inse-
cure, subject to early extinction. In the end, the very environment must
be made over: everything, from costume to architecture, will be re-
modeled and will in some degree record and express further the inner
change that has taken place.

By the time the final stage is reached, in which a whole society has
been re-shaped by the new doctrine and cult, a further transformation
has taken place: this curtails the great leap that the originating per-
sonality, departing from existing practices without yet being ham-
pered by the new ones his own doctrine in turn brings into existence,
has actually made. For the original intuitions of the new religion,
and the image of the new person as partly incarnated in the prophet
himself, must pass through many minds before they take hold in so-
ciety. On the way, they will encounter the inertia and resistance, yes,
the downright hostility, of many venerable institutions. For the sake
of sheer survival the new religion or philosophy will absorb many
contradictory elements derived from the static body of the existing
cultures it seeks to re-make: not least it will have to come to terms
with old biological claims that it has perhaps too peremptorily dis-
carded.

In the act of adapting itself to the existing order and its favored
“way of life” the new religion will, often without any conscious guile,
alter the original intentions of the prophet and even contradict his
demands: consider the place occupied by image-worship in later
Buddhism, or by the saints and the Virgin Mary in the Catholic
Church: consider, too, the glaring contradiction between Jesus’s in-
junction about simplicity in prayer with the elaboration of prayer in
the Christian liturgy. At many points, then, the need for adaptability,
as a condition for survival, may lead to wholesale perversions and
betrayals: so the gospel of humility and love will sometimes be car-
ried into action with fire and sword, with arrogance and hate.

The more extensive the claims of the new personality, the greater
are the chances for this perversion: Buddhism and Christianity have
been more open to self-betrayal than Confucianism or Mosaic Juda-

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ism. Every radical transformation takes place 'within a society that
is, by sheer force of habit if nothing more, deeply alien to the new
impulses and the new forms; for w^hat is any established institution
but a Society for the Prevention of Change? T!ie impetus of life it-
self, in the great mass of men, is limited by inertia. Left to themselves
many would be content to accept their animal lot: the common tribal
self suffices and one birth in a lifetime is enough for them. So in every
culture, during the period of its reintegration and renewal, there is
a constant tug between the old self and the new self, or as Christian-
ity used to put it, between the unregenerate Adam and the redeemed
Adam. These theological terms refer to observable facts: one could
witness them, during the past generation, operating in Communist
Russia, where very plainly the Old Adam of the Czarist tyranny has
won out. Why, people presently demand, should they seek to achieve
a larger common mold that ignores their racial pattern, their physio-
logical type, their “natural” tribal self? To conform more closely to
the pattern of their tribe is the only re-making of the natural man
that seems to them sensible, and this is so much a matter of merely
deepening ruts that are already deep that it seems part of the way of
nature itself.

Unfortunately, the very qualities of the new personality, which raise
the level of tensions and conflicts, are partly responsible for the be-
trayals that take place. Though the new prophet wins the faith of his
fellows by reminding them of the claims of their higher functions, his
rejection of nature and habit, of the racial “id” and the tribal “ego,”
is perhaps too peremptory and too unqualified; for however eagerly
man aims at expressing more fully his higher nature, he can never
become a disembodied spirit: such a perfection would remove all fur-
ther striving. In their very effort to overcome the tendency to slip back
too quickly into tribal norms, the great religious leaders have often
lifted their ideals so high above the vulgar patterns of life that in the
end they have defeated their own purposes. Not content to establish a
central nucleus, around which the new personality can form, they
demand a kind of life from the ordinary man that would, were he
able to follow it faithfully, transform him into a saint. Judging other
people’s capacity by his own, the leader makes little of this transfor-
mation. Because, for example, he is himself willing to forego all sex-
ual satisfactions, he may hold up an extravagant ideal of perfect
chastity before other men, without in his innocence even realizing
that for most normal people chastity of mind and spirit, so far from

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105

resulting from abstention, is the reward of a loving and harmonious
sexual life.

From the abyss of a Time of Troubles, these heroic renunciations
may in fact summon up, for a while, a depth and completeness of
response that a more reasonable expectation of change would not pro-
duce: so far they have a pragmatic justification. But the final results
are often deplorable and in time tliey cast undue discredit upon the
original doctrine: for the more earnest followers of the new^ faith
tend to live in a state of constant frustration, inadequacy, and guilt;
or to overcome the strain, they escape as soon as possible by degrad-
ing the original impulse into a superstitious worship of a remote Di-
vine Being with whom mortal flesh can have little in common. This
backsliding explains, perhaps, why the historic religions tend to identify
the flashes of divine insight the new prophet exhibits with the final ap-
pearance of God in human form. The mythical figure, growing at the
expense of the human one, becomes more easily assimilated: by
widening the breach between the heavenly and the earthly life, sinful
men make it easier for themselves to sink back into the more familiar
round of earthly existence.

So much for the shortcomings of the profound impulses that have
transformed whole societies. But not by such lapses that can account
for the new religion’s widespread influence and for the amazing per-
sistence of a new vision of man’s potentialities: a vision sometimes
transmitted through tens of millions of people for two or three thou-
sand years. What actually survives of the new person is what counts:
the image of a human being of the largest spiritual capacities: the
mutant of a new social species. Since it is the total personality that
becomes operative in this great conversion, the most effective prophets
disdain to use the written word for transmitting their message: as Walt
Whitman put it, ‘T and mine do not convince by arguments: we con-
vince by our presence.” So they communicate, even at many removes,
through a living chain of believers, the true apostolic succession, and
by the echoes that still reverberate on the air, the after-image that still
lingers on the retina, many centuries after they have gone.

If words alone conveyed the message of the new person, the in-
fluence of the great prophets would be hard to understand; for their
affirmations and acts differ in no special way from those of many other
men of genius: no mere examination of the new doctx'ine can fully
account for their impact. Let us .confess it: in Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Plato; in Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe; in Donne, Emerson, and

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Melville, there are occasional probings into the very core of human
existence that often surpass, in their profundity, any recorded observa-
tion of Confucius, Jesus, or Buddha. If scattered intuitions and in-
sights were capable of transforming life, they are indeed present in
every great literature in quantities copious enough to produce a change.
But the impress of a new personality is of a different order: through
him many diffused and scattered ideas unite to produce, not other new
ideas, but a man.

All this is part of the natural history of man; and it can be fol-
lowed, on a humbler scale, with a narrower scope and a shorter time-
span, in many lesser incarnations. The influence of Napoleon I pre-
sents itself: that model, not merely for the Julien Sorels, but for the
masters of finance and industry and politics in the nineteenth century.
Even in his own lifetime, Napoleon transformed laws and customs over
a wide area; and there was a Napoleon I style in furniture and deco-
ration, as well as in military strategy. With a little more luck and
success, he might even have become the titular deity of the new creed
of modern man: Arrivisme: the religion of the ‘'Bitch-goddess
Success.”

Does this mean that we must accept the enlargement of the new
personality, through the agency of a cult, a priesthood, and a church,
into a cosmic myth and a veritable all-embracing God? Not in the
least; for an emergent species of divinity, whose potent activating
effect upon a whole society we need not deny, has no need for such
an imposing background: this trick of enlargement is perhaps but a
special case of the general tendency to over-value an object of love.
The god that Buddha in time became was expressly denied by the
fundamental beliefs of Buddha himself. As for Jesus, there is more
ambiguity in his own position and testimony; but though the weight
of the evidence would point to his belief in his own supernatural
mission, that proof is almost negated by a single passage in which he
said: “Why call ye me good? Only God is good.” Is that not a sim-
ple profession of his purely human dimensions? Those words, left as
it were by inadvertence in the New Testament, are so strikingly in
contradiction to the usual claims of Jesus’s divinity that they have an
exceptional ring of authenticity, though they demolish the assumptions
upon which most of the New Testament and the Pauline Epistles rest.

Divine or human, heavenly or mundane, the fact is that, at certain
intervals of history, the potentialities for a more universal culture,
a more co-operative life, and a richly dramatic development of the

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107

human theme become visible in the image and example of a single
human being. At that moment a universal man appears and under his
direction a universal society becomes possible. This but repeats, in a
more decisive and transcendent fashion, a natural process that is con-
stantly at work in some degree in every human group and tribe and
nation. The imitation of that example provides a new destination for
society, and a new set of values and purposes, which start it moving
on a new path. Centuries and millennia may pass before that impulse
ceases to enrich civilization. But in an age that has rejected the func-
tion of personality, in its attempt to achieve statistical certainty through
dealing only with mass phenomena, the prevalence of a mechanistic
and behaviorist ideology undermines both the sense of reality and the
possibility of renewal. Before we can go further, therefore, it is nec-
essary that we should take account of this obstacle and firmly push
beyond it.

4: BIAS AGAINST THE PERSONAL

The birth of a dominant personality is the decisive step in the proc-
ess of making a limited, closed society capable of entering into wider
social relations, of a more inclusive and universal pattern. By loving
and imitating the parental, life-nurturing image of the new person,
by bowing to his wisdom, by following in his footsteps, by accepting
his ideal figure as a true and central image of man, toward which all
smaller figures should approximate, peoples of the most diverse back-
grounds and histories achieve a common bond and pursue a common
goal. Through this personal medium they achieve a common under-
standing and the possibility, despite all diversity, of combining and
synergizing their efforts. The process of arriving .at this unanimity is
no simple one: it demands effort. But the result of that effort is to
replace regional, tribal, and national differences, which set men apart,
with a sense of their common destiny, arising not out of common ani-
mal origins, but out of their unique historic purposes.

There are many factors in our day that make this imitation of the
person difficult , to understand in theory or to accept in practice. Even
when one makes allowances for the historical distortion of this whole
process through an over-magnification of the person, there is some-
thing about the manner of this transformation that stimulates a resist-
ance in the very groups that should, from their own experience, be in
the best position to interpret the workings of personality.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Perhaps the deepest source of this resistance in Western society is
the general reaction, since the close of the Middle Ages, against the
religious enhancement of personality. Humanism, which made man the
center again, lacked the humility to participate in a kind of change
that even the uneducated and the illiterate must share. F urthermore, in
the pursuit of more accurate knowledge about the behavior of physical
bodies, and with the growth of gigantic bureaucratic, industrial, and
military organizations, the process of depersonalization spread to
every other department. Result: our conscious world is largely a deper-
sonalized world, and our most accurate knowledge is limited to those
areas where the person does not operate.

In any account of dynamic social processes, our favored knowledge
today comes mainly from those realms where man’s behavior is closest
to animal behavior: Darwin’s pioneering work on animal psychology,
which established close relations between human behavior and that of
other animals, near or remote, has borne abundant fruit. In so far as
we take account of the human personality, we conceive it as being a
mere product of its past and its geographic and cultural environment,
without any allowance for the fact that at man’s level the future, the
imagined and projected future, is hardly less effectively operative.
We accept the past’s drag: we reject the future’s pull. If changes take
place in man’s character and destiny, current thought conceives man
himself as being merely a passive creature of forces outside himself:
we hold perhaps that little modifications can be made by food and
drugs, by habit and exercise, and that further social changes can be
effected by mechanical inventions, by laws and codes. By the contin-
ued operation of such agents, we even admit the possibility of pro-
found changes taking place eventually in a whole culture. But, in
terms of conventional science, we have no need to invoke the direct
action of personality to explain any of these changes: even its exist-
ence as a psychal ‘‘filter” is usually overlooked.

With this bias toward the de-personalized, it is little wonder that
we overlook every form of change that works from the top down: that
begins with the complex and the unique, the individual human in-
stance, and then radiates through the dense tissue of society. We find
it hard, with our pragmatic tendency to equate the subjective with
the unreal, to suppose that a change in intention and attitude, an up-
surge of new feelings and a crystallization of ideas around the tiny
seed of personality, can work any large organic changes within a com-
munity or a culture. There is nothing in the observed behavior of other

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109

animals to suggest that a transference of love, comparable to that
which takes place between a patient and his psychiatrist, can occur
on a collective scale and bring about a new orientation in a whole
society. If some change like this actually occurs during one of the
great religious transformations, our intellectual mentors are hardly
equipped to observe it: they will look instead for a fluctuation in the
climate or a change in the system of production to account for the
observed difference in behavior — if in fact they even notice what has
taken place.

To suggest that the person may have a more direct impact on so-
ciety is, in terms of the positivism that underlies most contemporary
thought, to introduce something as impalpable, indeed as inadmissibly
spookish, as the concept of the Aristotelian entelechy in biology. But
the fact is that this very impersonalism is the source of a radical error
quite as deep as that which the classic religions originally made in
giving fanciful accounts of the detailed operations of nature: indeed,
we have profoundly misread the modes of social change because we
seek to interpret them only on those levels that can be understood
without reference to the positive growth of the person. Nietzsche, in
The Genealogy of Morals, had some genuine insight into the more
personal aspect of this process; but unfortunately, in characteristic
German fashion, he mistook it to be the work of a superb master-class,
imposing its will forcefully upon a servile population.

But if the failure to understand the nature and function of per-
sonality is one of the main reasons for our so easily rejecting the
larger subjective process that works by conversion and imitation, th^re
are other limitations that spring from internal weaknesses that historic
religions themselves have disclosed. No single religion has yet done
justice to every aspect of the human personality: hence the new drama,
focused on the leading actor, fails to provide parts for many people
who are not, by nature, close to the biological type of the dominant
person.

In origin, for example, the Christian religion had no civic or do-
mestic role for its adherents, as Renan correctly pointed out: Jesus,
centering on his own special mission and the hope of a quick “end
of the world,” made no provisions for either vital or social continuity.
Some twelve hundred-odd years passed before Thomas Aquinas for-
mulated, with any completeness, the Christian response to situations
whose very existence Jesus ignored: the just distribution of political
power or the erotic responses and duties of man and wife. Hinduism,

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it would seem, has been more generous to all types of character and
disposition: hence a readiness, from the foundation of the nineteenth
century Brahmo Samaj onward, to acknowledge the moral insights
and the spiritual validity of Christianity and Islam. But unfortunately
Hinduism, until our own day, restricted the province of personality,
through its doctrine of permanent castes: a denial of the capacity for
personal development and transcendence within a single lifetime. Not
till the advent of Mahatma Gandhi, deeply permeated through his
reading of Thoreau and Tolstoy by the liberating thought of Chris-
tianity, was this fatal obstacle to universality challenged.

The other handicap is of a different nature. Once the first strong im-
pulse to honor and love and obey the new parent-image weakens, the
instinctual patterns of behavior that have been worked out in a stable
closed society, regain their hold: for the new way, by its very libera-
tion, is neither as well defined nor as secure as the old way. These
older tribal attitudes often regain their original position by bending
to the new universalism and taking it over for their own narrower pur-
poses. The resurgence of Roman officialism, Roman centralization,
even Roman materialism and superstition, in the Papacy in the era of
Gregory the Great, was an instance of this wily maneuver; and many
of the heresies that were rife between the fourth and the sixth cen-
turies A.D. may be looked upon as attempts, on the part of the prov-
inces, to counteract the new imperialism of Rome, masking itself as
a universal spiritual doctrine. The same thing has, ironically, hap-
pened in our own day with soviet communism; in the very process of
inner consolidation, it has come closer to the Muscovite regime of
Ivan the Terrible than to the cosmopolitan tendencies of Lenin; and it
now imposes its Russianism on Chinese and Poles alike, as an un-
challengeable ^‘communist” dogma.

Since modern science has, until recently, led to a mistrust of per-
sonality in any form, treating it solely as a source of error and sub-
jective mischief, it is no wonder that people reject the over-magnifica-
tion of the person, which in so many classic religions turns a prophet
of merely human dimensions into a god. That whole process seems
to defy both science and common sense, and those who worship these
deities cannot see beyond them. But our contemporaries have even
better reason for their distrust: tliey have witnessed a fraudulent god-
hood, projected before their own eyes, in the systematic deification of
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. The very success that has attended

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN Hi

this collective transmogrification only makes it harder to accept a doc-
trine based on the dynamic impact of the person.

In the case of these false deities the apparatus of inflation and dis-
tortion, the propaganda machines, the control of the sources of in-
formation, the destruction of all contrary evidence and the murder
of all who could bear living witness to the truth, the enforced prostitu-
tion of intellectuals who might have exposed the cheat, the constant
display of oversized images of Big Brother himself — all this has been
as visible to the innocent onlooker as the contrivances by which an
inept magician performs his tricks. Even those who most urgently
wish to be fooled still know how the trick is done. Though Doubting
Thomases are thrust promptly into concentration camps and torture
chambers, enough new ones come forth in every generation to make it
necessary to keep the engines of suppression working vigorously and
vigilantly.

But why should such a show of force be necessary? The answer
suggests a profound difference between bastard religions and real
ones, though the same social pressures not merely cause the two spe-
cies to grow side by side, but — as so often happens in a garden — cause
undesirable weeds to bear many points of physical resemblance to the
flowering plants. The saving fact is this: the false Messiah may not
be imitated and can not be loved; or rather, the more successfully his
ruthlessness is taken over by others, the more surely will his regime
break up. Since he does not spontaneously evoke love, the very pres-
sure to display adulation and reverence must finally make people
burst forth in extreme hate: witness the fate of Mussolini.

Consider, too, the careers of Hitler and Stalin: they reflect on a
large scale that perversion of personality which accompanies a dis-
integrating society and brings about its final collapse. Both Hitler and
Stalin, two common men, the first psychopathic and vile, a connoisseur
of corruption and cruelty, the second shrewd, relentless, supple, but
likewise brutal, have attempted within their own lifetimes to bend mil-
lions of men to their will. To effect this they have represented them-
selves, not as fellow mortals, but as deities worthy of abject worship
and slavish obedience. They are the authors of all earthly good: the
conquerors of all evil: by their miraculous touch tyranny becomes de-
mocracy and conquest liberation. What they have no hopes of achiev-
ing by persuasion and spontaneous co-operation, they seek to impose
by force, backed by superstitious observances. Fortunately for man-
kind, unfortunately for the dictators’ millennial ambitions, they re-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

verse the process by which personality actually operates in history.
Intent on taking advantage of the superstitious over-magnification of
personality, which so often takes place even with a cinema star or
a radio crooner, they invent an auxiliary apparatus of repression to
hasten the process.

Thus these leaders sought to impose a God upon their fellow men,
before they had transformed themselves into the image of a veritable
person: loving and life-bestowung. Even with mirrors, they could not
possibly succeed. What happened when Goebbels magnified and multi-
plied the debased image of Hitler? Ten years of unqualified success
sufficed to seal Germany’s fate. The devout imitation of Stalin by his
own henchmen can be counted upon to produce their systematic ex-
tirpation of each other: this process, begun by Stalin himself, will
probably be carried on without restriction upon his death — all past
annals support this prediction. Thus the historic “^Savior Emperor,”
that darkly benevolent figure who so often arises in a disintegrating
civilization, only hastens that disintegration by his inherent contempt
for the normal operations of personality. Precisely because of his love
of power, he can make no use of the power of love. So the last stage
in the downfall of a civilization is the mutual extermination of the un-
loved and the unlovable.

5: NEXT DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION

This discussion should help us now to detect the fallacy in the cur-
rent hope that traditional religion, particularly Christianity, if it once
recaptured the hearts of men, might serve to re-direct the demoralized
energies of Western civilization. Even if the present crisis were not on
a worldwide scale, no crystallized orthodoxy, Catholic or Protestant,
Christian or Oriental, seeking merely to recover ground it had occu-
pied in tlie past, would be adequate to the catastrophic situation man-
kind now confronts.

Before any existing body of beliefs can become active again, it must
both absorb the fresh elements that Western civilization has brought
into the world during the last three centuries, and it must detach it-
self from the institutional forms that now limit their power and use-
fulness. If the ascending path of growth leads from the interior out-
ward, from abstract formulation to physical embodiment, the way of
renewal proceeds first in the reverse direction: through disembodiment,
detachment, disenchantment, finally through the wholesale withdrawal

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MAN US

of interest from the existing society. In that state, naked and alone,
the spirit may rise to new illuminations and achieve a new center of
growth.

To preserve the vital impulses of the traditional religions, then, their
followers must escape from their buildings and their rituals, they must
withdraw from their prudent attachments to the wealthy and the
worldly: they must strip themselves voluntarily of many ancient dog-
matic claims that defy reason and so, in the end, unsettle faith. When
the process has gone far enough, those who keep to their purpose will
reach an inner core. At that point, the possibility of unity and common
action will exist. Only from this inner nodule can fresh growth take
place; and only by this stripping down of the collective ego, to a
point where there is neither white nor black, male nor female, Chris-
tian nor Hindu, Theosophist nor Marxian communist, can a fresh start
be made.

Those who still believe that Christianity alone can save our civiliza-
tion, or rather, deliver modern man from the miscarriages of his civili-
zation, are perhaps best represented by Arnold J. Toynbee. This ad-
mirable historian has been driven by his convictions into theology,
only to become a theologian who, to push his convictions to their con-
clusion, must turn his back upon history. To arrive at his view, Mr
Toynbee assumes two things: one is that the Christian faith is alone
the true one, and that Jesus is the only god who ever took human form.
The other is that Western civilization, since the breakup of the medi-
eval synthesis, has merely been monotonously duplicating the errors
that brought Hellenic civilization low. Into a quite different set of
symptoms, he reads the same disease and mechanically prescribes the
same original remedy.

As for the first assumption, it is beyond both proof or denial, since
it rests solely on an act of faith. But the notion that God manifested
himself only once in human form contradicts the postulate of continu-
ity on which the present philosophy rests: so I must challenge it. On
its face, this idea is as unreasonable as the notion that a small Semitic
tribe that settled in Palestine was the exclusive recipient of divine
favor. Though I have no doubt that tlie advent of Christianity was a
singular occurrence which re-polarized the existing historic forces,
similar transformations are equally visible in the other civilizations
the historian describes. In the sense that Christianity “saved” West-
ern civilizatigm, Buddhism saved that of India, Confucianism China.
If the saving, on Toynbee’s later interpretation, was through the forma-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

tion of an otherworldly non-historic society in the form of a Church,
then Buddhism, at least, like Islam, shows identic characteristics to
Christianity.

The second assumption, however, is open to challenge on grounds
common both to Toynbee’s philosophy and to one that contradicts it.
For the fact is that few of the typical phenomena of a world-weary
society, such as that which followed the decay of the Olympian reli-
gion and the fall of the Greek city, did in fact come after the disinte-
gration of the medieval idolum: there is simply no parallel. Though
the fourteenth century showed a rapid disintegration throughout West-
ern Europe, made catastrophic by the effects of the Black Death, the
period between 1400 and 1900 was marked by an equally rapid re-
covery. During that half -millennium, indeed, an extraordinary out-
burst of human energy took place: it led to the colonization of the new
world, to the mastery of the forces of nature, to the formulation of a
new scientific outlook, which built up a method for creating valid
knowledge and for controlling natural forces, and, not least, to a
swelling wave of sheer animal vitality, marked by a tremendous in-
crease in world population. Productivity and reproductivity went hand
in hand.

Hardly anywhere till the beginning of the twentieth century, or
rather, till the First World War, were there concrete evidences of
those shrinkages and lapses that went on so dishearteningly through-
out the Hellenic world from the end of the fifth century B.C., and
again in the Roman world, from the second century B.c. onward. Not
least, the energies of the West showed themselves in acts of spiritual
creativity. The long line of writers and artists, beginning in literature
with Shakespeare and Cervantes and Rabelais, in painting with Tinto-
retto and Breughel, and the equally remarkable line of scientists and
philosophers, from Kepler and Vesalius and Galileo, from Spinoza
and Leibnitz and Kant to the men of the twentieth century would not
indicate a downhill movement in culture, except to someone who was
standing on his head. To interpret this whole process as essentially a
negative and non-creative one, as Mr Toynbee is tempted to do, is
willfully to trim the facts to the theory — if one may speak so harshly
of the mistakes of such a genial and humane spirit.

Today the situation, in many quarters, has indeed begun to alter
drastically for the worse. Within a half-century, a series of devas-
tating changes, comparable to those that took place in ^e fatal four-
teenth century as recorded by Petrarch, are now visible: this has hap-

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115

pened with startling rapidity, as in the spread of cancer cells in a
body that hitherto seemed healthy. Today we do in fact— and here
Toynbee’s insight seems both penetrating and valid— face many end-
processes. Schooled in the ideology of progress, our contemporaries
have been slow to recognize these dangers, and slower still to correct
them. Though they were first pointed out by Jacob Burckhardt, in the
heyday of Victorian complacency, and uncovered once again by Henry
Adams a generation later, they remained ‘‘unbelievable.” Our devel-
opment has not been as harmonious and as triumphant as the philoso-
phers of progress proclaimed: we have now to pay the penalty for our
one-sidedness and our extemalism, for our devaluation of the per-
sonal, for our puerile over-valuation of the machine, for our failure
to embrace the tragic sense of life and to make the sacrifices that
would, if made in time, have saved our civilization from its corpse-
strewn Fifth Act.

This miscarriage of our civilization has come about, however, not
through a seepage of its faith or a waning of its energies, but through
an over-concentration of its energies, through an excess of zeal, through
a fanaticism of scientific rationalism, so proud of its multiplying dis-
coveries and inventions tliat it continued to run past the danger signals
on the road, like a drunken engineer on a streamlined train, unaware
that his inordinate speed multiplies all the natural hazards.

The difiiculties Mr Toynbee forces himself to read into the earlier
centuries of “modern Western civilization” did not exist until a much
later period. For the fact is, the crisis of the fourteenth century acti-
vated new forces in society that gave life direction and meaning for
another five centuries: the adventures of exploration and colonization,
the disciplines of capitalist enterprise and systematic mechanical in-
vention, the dionysian reactions of the new painters and poets, sym-
bolized in every aspect by Rabelais’s mythical Gargantua, were all
life-affirming responses. If there had not been such a wide swing away
from the cult of life-negation and otherworldly salvation, the decom-
position of the medieval Church would possibly have gone on even
more swiftly: and doubtless it would have produced more noxious
stenches and by-products: its engines of torture might have been pres-
ently adapted to mass-production, instead of giving way, even in
Catholic hands, to engines of utilitarian enterprise.

What this decadent Christian civilization would have been, left to
itself, one can perhaps detect in those undercurrents of expression from
Frangois Villon to Baudelaire and the early T. S. Eliot: symbolic

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Fleurs du Mai blooming in what might have been, but for the fresh
energies released in the fifteenth century, a universal Waste Land.
Modern historians have yet to appraise how decisively the energies of
the new industrial civilization, after the eighteenth century, helped to
rejuvenate the Roman Catholic Church.

If orthodox Christianity had retained in itself the means of renew-
ing medieval civilization and averting its later miscarriages, it would
hardly have lost its grip on Europe. And if the Church was unable to
save even itself intact, during a crisis when it was still supremely in
spiritual command, what likelihood is there that it will, with only its
past insight and its historic forms of conversion, be capable of trans-
forming peoples that are now only nominally Christian and a world
that is predominantly non-Christian? The earlier transformation that
Christianity actually accomplished was of a simpler nature. For the
original Christian answer to the disintegration of classic culture in-
volved merely persuading the proud pagan to let go of something he
no longer confidently possessed, or even actively desired. Until yester-
day our present civilization showed few signs of such weariness.

What Toynbee’s special theory of Palingenesis or Re-Birth does
not take into account is the fact that though many of the negative con-
ditions that once made Christianity possible, nay imperative, are again
here, the same basis for reintegration does not exist: the formative
Christian nucleus, however active through all the centuries, holds now
only a tiny portion of its original mass. In origin a fresh form in
classic society, Christianity is now only an encapsulated survival in
our own: its restoration would betray the very disease of archaicism
that Toynbee properly rejects in all other religions.

Survivals, in the nature of things, lack the dynamic force of mutants.
Once, Christianity was truly oriented to the future: now it is directed
to perpetuating a past that cannot, except in a mummified form, have
any continued existence. While the vital truths of Christianity must
be included in a new synthesis, this holds equally for other religions
and philosophies. To claim unconditional acceptance for Christian
dogma as embodied in any of the historic Churches, is to deny the
essential idea of an emergent divinity; for, as the Victorian poet sang,
“God fulfills himself in many ways, lest one good custom should cor-
rupt the world.”

On this matter, I would set Josiah Royce’s analysis above Toyn-
bee’s; for long ago Royce touched the quick of our present dilemma.
In discussing The Problems of Christianity, in 1913, Royce said: “The

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117

office of religion is to aim toward the creation on earth of the Beloved
Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and
applying the arts which shall win men over to unity and which shall
overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere
individuals, but of communities. Now such arts are still to be dis-
covered. Judge every social device^ every proposed reform, every na-
tional and local enterprise, by the one test: Does this help toward the
coming of the Universal Community? If you have a Church, judge
your own church by this standard; and if your Church does not fully
meet this standard, aid toward reforming your Church accordingly.”
That puts the case plainly, and it applies to all our institutions. We
cannot have unity among the so-called United Nations unless we in-
voke unity and work for unity at every level of human activity.

By proper extension, one must apply Royce’s insight. to every other
form of religion, including, naturally, the Marxian gospel of dialecti-
cal materialism. No present Catholicism is sufficiently Catholic, no
universalism sufficiently universal, to join in spirit the divided nations
and make possible our imperative goal: One World.

This perhaps explains why the most universal of religious doctrines,
that of Baha-’ullah, the founder of the Bahai religion, has not so far
prevailed. For the better part of a century the adherents of Bahaism
have proclaimed the unity of mankind and the need for world order:
their noble intentions, their timely exhortations, their catholic injunc-
tions, represent man’s best hopes. But one prophet more, one religion
more, no matter how enlightened his aims, is not what the situation
requires; nor can rational persuasion alone bring about the essential
conversion. When the overall change comes it will spread rapidly from
a multitude of centers: it will infuse a religious sense of a common
purpose and end, even in departments of life not recognizably reli-
gious. To be ready for that opportune moment, each religion, each
secular philosophy, each going institution, must widen and deepen
its own vein of universalism.

Not by accident, perhaps, one must turn to a Hindu thinker, rather
than a Christian one, for an explicit statement of this new universal-
ism. I find it in a passage from Keshab Chandra Sen:

‘T believe in the Church Universal, the deposit of all ancient wis-
dom and the receptacle of modern science, which recognizes in all
prophets and saints a harmony, in all scriptures a unity, and through
all dispensations a continuity, which abjures all that separates and
divides and always magnifies unity and peace, which harmonizes rea-

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118

son and faith, yoga and bhakti, asceticism and social duty . . . and
which shall make all nations and sects one kingdom and one family
in the fullness of time.” In that spirit, only in that spirit, will the
classic religions find regeneration: only so can all nations and kin-
dreds and peoples, to use the words of the Apocalypse, come within
speaking distance of each other.

6: THE UNIVERSAL COMMITMENT

Those who are looking for a change to take place, along the classic
lines that Buddhism and Christianity and Mohammedism followed,
are applying, to the unique events of our time, a mode of thought that
over-weights the traditional and the repetitive, and ignores the possi-
bility of a new act of creation. But the change that made it possible
to redeem the Roman world needed a thousand years for its consum-
mation. We know that the living places of our planet may be wiped
out, and our planet itself denuded of life, through the wholesale mis-
applications of scientific power, unless the change that alters the con-
dition of modern man and the direction of his activities takes place in
much shorter order: almost, as one reckons historic time, within the
twinkling of an eye.

No matter how eflScacious the example of Buddha or Jesus may have
been, we cannot put our faith in renewal by a similar process; or
rather, though the process itself may be similar, the time in which
it operates must be, abbreviated. How can this be done? By looking,
not for a single transforming agent, but for millions upon millions of
them, in every walk of society, in every country: a democratic trans-
formation, dispersed and widespread, to replace those centralized and
authoritarian images which would today, under our current nihilism,
be either ineffectual or tyrannous.

Let us confess it: such a change has never yet taken place in the
past. But the conditions which now make this kind of change impera-
tive have never existed either: the extent of the catastrophe that threat-
ens gives the measure of the transformation that will be necessary in
order to master it. But the fact that there are no favorable historic
precedents is not, for the philosophy advanced in these pages, an un-
climbable barrier: we have learned nothing valuable about man’s na-
ture and destiny unless we have learned that man holds, in far larger
degree than the physical universe, the possibility of continuous crea-
tion. Thanks to the very form our institutions and machines have taken.

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119

with our multifold channels of communication, millions of minds are
now aware of man’s dilemma and awakened to the danger that threat-
ens all life: if they are not fully awakened today, they may be roused

even to the point of action — tomorrow.

This fact perhaps makes possible the change of attitude and purpose
that will halt the processes of disintegration before they have reached
the critical point where they can no longer be controlled. Though no
one mind can impart his own dynamic of renewal to a world that is
now radically endangered by its paranoia, its incapacity to foster love,
a wholesale quickening of many minds might restore the collective bal-
ance. If but one person in ten were fully awakened today, fully capable -
of exercising his higher centers of intelligence and morality, the fatal
processes that we have set in motion could be arrested, and. a new
direction set.

On that possibility, mankind’s security and salvation now seem to
hang. The task of the individual Messiah of the past now devolves
equally on all men: likewise the burden of sacrifice. No Diogenes need
run through the streets with his lantern looking for an honest man : no
John the Baptist need perform a preliminary cleansing and absolution
upon others, while waiting for the true prophet to come. Those are
the images and the expectations of another era. Today each one of us
must turn the light of the lantern inward upon himself; and while he
stays at his post, performing the necessary work of the day, he must
direct every habit and act and duty into a new channel: that which
will bring about unity and love. Unless each one of us makes this
obligation a personal one, the change that must swiftly be brought
about cannot be effected,

i But all this is beyond historical precedent and probability? Granted.
lAn impossible dream? No, For why should we readily hail marvels
like the transmutation of matter and energy, issuing out of the phy-
,sical world, without our admitting the possibility of equally radical
departures issuing out of the subjective world, which is itself the
source of our mastery of physical phenomena? All challenges to ani-
mal lethargy and inertia begin in a dream; and every dream is ^‘im-
possible” until the dreamer heeds it, communicates it, develops the
rational means of creating its own fulfillment: until the dream, pass-
ing into consciousness as an inchoate impulse and stir, at first but a
shadowy shape, works itself out into a new reality: the reality of the
paintings of the Ajanta caves, of The Divine Comedy, of the Pyramids
of the Mayas and Aztecs: the reality of life lived in symbol-laden

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120

cities under justice and law. Only one thing is needful: faith in the
dream itself; for the very ability to dream is the first condition of the
dream^s realization. And which is better? to sink into a nightmare,
equally self-fabricated, though we close our eyes to our own constant
part in this pathological process— the nightmare of extermination, in-
cineration, and universal death?— or to dream of the alternative proc-
esses that will endow individual men and the race at large with a
new plan of life? Better the possible self-deception of this dream than
the grim fact of that nightmare.

The new age will begin when a sufficient number of men and women
in every land and culture take upon themselves the burden men once
sought to transfer to an Emperor, a Messiah, a dictator, a single God-
like man. That is the ultimate lesson of democracy: the burden cannot
be shifted. But if each one of us, in his own full degree, accepts this
desperate condition for survival, that which seemed a threat to man s
further development will be transformed into a dynamic opportunity.

CHAPTER V.

THE BASIS OF HUMAN
DEVELOPMENT

1: MAN’S WILL TO FORM

The doctrines of Progress and Evolution both supplied modem man
with certain valuable insights absent from most traditional ethical
systems: particularly with the notion that no static system of ethics
could do justice to the still-unfathomed possibilities of human devel-
opment. What had once seemed to be -final revelations of value and
purpose now became limited, provisional, local, relative, the product
of historic events that are open to the correction and amplification of
further experience. Exit Plato’s Republic.

But neither doctrine could supply modern man with the materials
needed for a more adequate morality, since one must first formulate
a positive measure of the good before the word progress in an ethical
sense can have meaning. Without a concept of purpose, without an
image of perfection, biological evolution, even when it embraces man’s
special nature and needs, can mean nothing more than the procession
of more complicated organic forms in a continuing time-series. The
arrest of such forms at any particular point remains meaningless, or
at least morally neutral, unless some higher goal is definable.

Now man is not merely the unfinished but the self-fabricating ani-
mal. What other organisms do by purely organic means, in and through
the structure of their own bodies, man does by extra-organic means,
sometimes within his lifetime, or at least within a few centuries.
Through his culture, man continually remakes himself, recasts his
functions, and gives form to his environment. That will-to-form is it-
self one of his main distinctions. Man is, as it were, the leopard who
knows how to change his spots; or rather, he is the creature who has
found the secret of becoming at will a fish-man, a bird-man, or a mole-

man — even an angel-man or a demon-man, though angels and demons

121

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

are as lacking in nature as warm-blooded animals were in the days
when the great reptiles alone reigned.

Instead of taking life as it comes and quietly adapting himself to
external conditions, man is constantly evaluating, discriminating,
choosing, reforming and transforming at every moment of his exist-
ence; and this has been true throughout his history. By conscious se-
lection, man increasingly imposes his own will on nature and not least
on that ultimate product of nature^ his own self. ‘‘Choosing is cre-
ating!” And the goal of tliat choice, in man, is his own fuller and
further development. No natural history of man can omit, without
grave distortion and error, the place of values in his existence. And
any scientific anthropology that attempts to ignore values, as outside
the pale of science, or to dismiss values as culture-bound and so self-
enclosed, must lack the ability to describe the process of human de-
velopment, since it has no criterion for distinguishing arrest from
progress in the department where it most matters.

Doubtless simple modes of estimation and appraisal begin far be-
low the level of man. Every creature must distinguish food from poi-
son, security from danger, friend from foe; even the lowly amoeba,
as H. S. Jennings describes its behavior, seems to know what it wants.
Judgments of value long antedate judgments of fact; and no judg-
ment of fact is uncolored by values, since even the desire for neutrality
or unemotionality is itself an expression of human value. The very
mode of science that proclaims the non-existence of values in nature
is itself the product of man’s over-valuation of mechanical order, and
his special regard for those elementary truths that can be established
best on an impersonal basis.

Man can apparently make intellectual errors of a flagrant kind
without suffering too seriously in consequence: indeed, not till man
seeks to form a coherent world picture does it matter to him that his
own uncorrected fantasies have distorted or utterly effaced many patent
objective facts. Knowledge of good and evil, on the other hand, lies
at the very root of human existence. However poor man’s positive
knowledge may be, he must constantly affix positive or negative values
to every event, in order to guide his own life in the direction of de-
velopment. To know the difference between right and wrong, between
good and evil, is the basis of survival, even before it becomes the con-
dition of renewal. In this department, any serious misappraisal will
have formidable consequences.

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123

Most of man’s evaluations and choices, naturally, were made long
ago by the society and culture in which the person finds himself. Sig-
nificantly, in their origin, the words ethics and morals are equivalent
to habits and customs; and firm social habits, since they are the very
basis of orderly and calculable behavior, are fundamental to all higher
forms of development. While we may rise above our habits into free-
dom, we must never sink below them into random caprice. Life would
be one long blundering frustrating confusion if each generation had
to discover entirely by itself what was good for it. That is why a
purely experimental ethics, worked out from day to day in the light
of the situations encountered in a single lifetime, will ordinarily lead
to disaster. (If there may once have been doubts about this observa-
tion, the experience of the last two generations has harshly confirmed
its truth.) But even when human conduct is based on sound tradition and
guided further by reason, sound choices are not automatic or infallible;
nor is there any assurance that good intentions will produce good re-
sults. Even when values are well established and widely assimilated,
they must still in each particular case be recognized as appropriate
to the occasion and carried out. The habitual, the traditional, the con-
servatively moral, are necessary starting, points for the proper conduct
of life; but they do not in themselves guarantee man’s development.

The reasons for this limitation should be plain. As human life rises
above its primitive concern with bodily security, the nature of good
and evil becomes less obvious. In all the higher expressions of life
there is need for greater intelligence and sensibility and understanding
to aid in discrimination, and for greater wakefulness, to recognize oc-
casions for intervention or departures from the prescribed norm. The
higher the development, the wider the margin of freedom — but also
the more serious the consequences of perverse desires and bad choices.
There is hardly a phase of human life, from diet to dress, from sexual
practices to religious ceremonial, that does not show regressions from
sound choices, lapses sometimes made far down in the evolutionary
scale. The passage from tribal society, where goods have been stabil-
ized and routinized, toward an open society, where goods are subject
to re-appraisal and new choices become possible, is a critical one in
human development; for often a sound instinctual pattern may be
destroyed by half-baked intelligence long before anything worthy of
taking its place has been achieved. The self-confident iconoclasts in
Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderers or Getting Married knew far less

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

about the nature of sex, love, and the family than the fecund Victorian
couples against whose prim household gods they were in revolt.

Man’s constant re-shaping of himself, his community, his environ-
ment, does not lead to any final state of equilibrium. Even the notion
of self-perfection implies the further projection of a self beyond that
which may be momentarily achieved: only death can end the dynamics
of growth, crisis, and transcendence. And tempting though it may be
to do so, one must not confuse the good with what is socially acceptable,
or that which promotes the adjustment of the self to the group or the
community. Pragmatists and totalitarians have both made this radical
error; by their insistence upon conformity to an external pattern,
whether imposed by authority or by a mechanistic apparatus, they have
proved hostile to creative processes that have a subjective and internal
origin.

There are moments when the continued growth in the person de-
mands the endurance of maladjustment: moments that may be accom-
panied by complete alienation from the community, and require a
readiness to encounter the active hostility of its members. These mo-
ments are known to saints and martyrs at the very point when they are
exerting their unique influence: indeed, every innovator and inventor,
even on a more pedestrian level, must often bear the penalties of his
nonconformity in rejection and poverty. Without such oppositions and
tensions, without such lonely defiance, the pressures of the group might
stifle all growth. In some degree, nonconformity is a necessary con-
dition for human development; and that is why the age that produced
an abundance of nonconformists in Western Europe was one of the
most creative and fruitful the world has known.

The attempt to shift the ethical center from the person to the group
overlooks their actual relationship. The group molds the person and
gives him a function in his community, provides him with a role to
play, bringing out the possibilities of social man: but the person, when
he has absorbed and made over what the community provides, in turn,
by his very, detachment, gives the group itself the possibility of acting
with some of the freedom of the person. Eventually the person must
take the group with him on the path of development or perish for lack
of support. Nationalism unfortunately misreads this interplay between
person and group: from Fichte onward, the philosophers of national-
ism have held that tlie nation encloses all possible goods: it falsely
identifies the good with the tribal, the customary, the traditional life
of kin and kitib, while it identifies tixe not-good or evil with the out-

THE BASI$ OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

125

sider, the foreigner, the barbarian, “Blut und Boden,” “Sacro Ego-
ismo,” the “American way of life,” thus become mythic deities, whose
worship inflates nationalists with a spurious sense of their own virtue,
spurious since every other community has a similar set of tribal gods
and a self-sufficient ideology just as fatal to human unity and co-op-
eration.

Even in the somewhat more innocent form of a wholly social theory
of ethics, the identification of the person with the group overlooks the
very condition that is essential for their reciprocal development: the
maintenance of tension between the actual and the potential, between
achieved goods and possible ones. To make the good consist in con-
formity to the group pattern does away with this tension in the name
of a pre-established harmony and conformity. So far from restoring
human values that have been lost during the last three centuries, na-
tionalism, in both its naive and its sophisticated forms, whether demo-
cratic or totalitarian, would attempt to restore an obsolete tribal pat-
tern of identity and unanimity. The engines for creating such a limited
human type are more powerful today than ever before: for the psy-
chological laboratory and the propaganda machine and the school are
now re-enforced by the terrors of the corrective labor camp and the tor-
ture chamber. The final outcome of that process has been foreshadowed
by more than one imaginative writer, from Capek to Zamiatin: no-
where more horribly, perhaps, than in George Orwell’s realistic night-
mare: 1984. It comes to nothing less than the annihilation of man.

2: NEEDS AND VALDES

Life is the source of all human goods, even those that transcend it.
To foster life, to select higher forms of life, and to project further
goals for life’s development — this is the grand human imperative. All
our special obligations and duties, as citizens and workers, relate to
this higher one. To serve life well, over a long span of time, man’s
immediate purposes must, in the long run, fit into such larger organic
and cosmic purposes as he can discern and interpret. As a species, man
has a moi'al obligation to be intelligent, as well as an intellectual ob-
ligation to further his own moral and esthetic development.

Man’s own needs and functions are many and various: what sets
them apart from their purely animal counterparts is that they lend
themselves to a far greater degree of elaboration, for they draw on
emotions, feelings, and fantasies whose expressions overlie and some-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

times almost conceal the organic purpose they serve. What begins as
a bare physical need becomes elaborated into ritual and, under pres-
sure of a formative idea and purpose, may rise into a dramatic action.
Take the simplest case, the need for food: common to all animals. If
that need halted in man at the instinctual level, it would remain like
even more pressing needs, those for air and water — too peremptory to
be a source of value. But the expression of the need for food is not
confined to the digestive tract: it awakens activities and interests that
involve the whole organism; to get food and make it fit for his eating,
man uses a hundred ingenious devices for hunting and cultivating, for
preparing and preserving, that no other animal has ever, in their im-
mense variety, approached. Expanded by this total engagement of the
organism, the original need, once capable of being satisfied on the
crudest terms, becomes transformed into a series of social and personal
acts. Eventually esthetic delight and gustatory excitement, hospitality
and friendly intercourse, even religious ritual, enter into both the get-
ting and eating of food. This tempering of greedy desire, this em-
broidery of need, this "'working over of the raw fact,” in short, this
involvement in man’s whole nature characterizes a large part of his
values.

Though the value of food for man originates in his physiological
structure it does not remain there. Even the imperious and unbearable
stimulus of extreme hunger may be curbed by a cultural taboo, like
that of the Moslems against pork. So, too, the infant who is offered
food without friendly intercourse and love, as in an old-fashioned or-
phanage, may reject it or fail to be nourished by an otherwise adequate
diet: the very processes of digestion prosper only if re-enforced by
attitudes and feelings that have no direct bearing on the function in
hand. Just as thought itself may be partly interpreted as an arrested
impulse to action, which allows a wider canvass of the whole situation
and a more adequate response, so value may be described as a need
that has found expression by a circuitous route that draws into it other
functions of the organism and brings about a wider sharing of the oc-
casion with other members of society. The organic need subserves sym-
bolic expression: in the act of satisfying his wants man makes them
more interesting.

What we properly call a value in life is precisely this organic mix-
ture of need, interest, feeling, purpose, and goal: the physical or phys-
iological impact of a need is only a small part of its expression. It
follows, then, that a scheme of life founded on raw human needs alone.

THE BASIS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

127

without any further efflorescence in values, must remain at a sub-human
level; for a life that is stripped, in theory or in fact, to the ingestion
of so many calories of food, the performance of a specified number
of man-hours of work, the achievement of a certain number of or-
gasms, is incapable of embracing the social and personal satisfactions
to be found in eating, working, and mating. Even the most primitive
cultures at the lowest margin of subsistence do more for their members
than this.

Perhaps the best recent discussion of values was that of Dr Edward
L. Thorndyke, in Human Nature and Society. This perceptive treatise
is all the more remarkable because it came from a psychologist who
had attempted for the better part of his life to establish purely quanti-
tative methods, without reference to values, in psychology. But even
he showed a tendency to define values as goods in themselves. Thus
Thorndyke said, by way of illustration, that ‘'sunshine is in general
better than inky darkness,” curiously ignoring the conditions essential
for sleep; or that laughing is better than wailing, overlooking the fact
that grief makes laughter acutely painful, and that when one is con-
fronted by an occasion for grief, the ability to express it in tears and
sounds of anguish is preferable, even on the lowest grounds of health,
to bottling it up. (Note that the suppression of tears and the abandon-
ment of the traditional rituals of grief in modern civilization, mainly
through our withdrawal of interest from death, in itself points to an
erosion of values.)

There are no intrinsic goods apart from the purposes and needs of
men: only in relation to him do some goods become absolute. The
only imconditional good, as Immanuel Kant truly observed, is the will-
to-goodness. Values arise out of the natural occasions for living; and
they serve to magnify beyond their immediate deserts the processes of
satisfaction and fulfillment. Conceivably all our needs could be satis-
fied directly in a push-button world, contrived exclusively to our con-
venience; but such a life would be more empty than even that of an
embryo, since it would lack the specific conditions for human growth
— ^namely, that in the course of fulfilling our needs we should also
enter, by this useful back door, into the domain of beauty and sig-
nificance.

Now, in all going cultures, man is born into a world of established
values: here every instinctual need is broadened, yet partly concealed,
by a social form, as the naked body is soon covered by decorations or
clothes. The production and conservation of values is one of the main

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

concerns of human existence: all that a man does and is depends upon
his taking part in this process. Thorndyke is right, therefore, in re-
marking that if one graded value from the intensely good to the in-
tensely bad, only a small part of the things that one does and acts and
handles are of a neutral nature: they are either life-furthering or life-
impeding. “Values to man and men,” says Thorndyke, “may be in-
finitesimal, and approximate a neutral zone or zero between good and
bad, for many or all persons under most or even all conditions. It con-
sequently does little harm to think of the value, say, of having one
grain of dirt washing to the sea or dredged out of the sea as zero. But
the number of events which are really neither good nor bad in the
slightest degree is much smaller than common thinking would esti-
mate.” . . . These facts of natural history are important to bear in
mind: ethics rests on them.

Life is a selective process: that is one of the conditions for all
growth. Though the organism is sometimes pictured as a sort of filter
or membrane, these figures hardly do more justice to its activities
than the neutral blank sheet of paper on which Locke erroneously sup-
posed the environment left its definite mark. For the fact is that all
organisms are striving and forward-moving creatures: even their most
passive responses are still determined by general goals derived from
their organic plan of life: they actively reach out for one kind of good
and reject another. Some of the selections that the organism makes
have become so deeply ingrained in its behavior that it cannot, even
under pressure, even under threat of defeat, alter its disposition: it
must stick to the goods of its own species, the goods that honor its own
style of life and that allow it to fill out, in time, its proper shape.

Many of these commitments are so old and have involved so many
co-adaptations with other species that it is impossible for the organ-
ism, so to say, to change its mind. Though faced with starvation through
lack of herbage, sheep do not become ravening creatures, living off
rabbits and mice: their very tooth structure is a guarantee against their
so defying their own sheepish nature. By contrast, man lives in an in-
finitely various environment and his choices, through his wide range
of inventions and adaptations, are multifold. Relatively, man is an
uncommitted animal. As compared with other animals, man is so un-
set in his ways, so dynamic, so full of unfathomed potentialities, so
capable of coming up with more than one answer to the same question,
that the tasks of selection become major ones for him.

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129

Indeed, the higher man rises in his own development, the less fixed
are his responses and the wider his range of choices: likewise the
greater opportunity he encounters for perversions, maladaptations,
that more limited animals escape. The institution of war is such a
large-scale perversion : in origin, it may have sprung out of a struggle
for a limited food supply in a narrow area; and this act may have
been prolonged beyond its natural limits because it lent itself to ritual-
istic elaboration, which lessened its deadliness and turned it for primi-
tives into an exciting game. With the very advance of civilization war
became a collective drama: not justified by animal needs or tangible
economic gains, but expressive of ideas and purposes of a peculiarly
human sort: irrational but imperious. So in modern times this mon-
strous negation of values has captured and drained off energies that
should have gone to the culture of cities and the development of man.

In making evaluations to further his own growth, civilized man
merely carries forward habits that took form at a much lower level
of organic development. What is abnormal, what is fatal, is to have
no standards of value and no methods of evaluation. When David
Hume reduced value to whatever served impulse, he took the first
intellectual step toward the nihilism that threatens to engulf our age.
Today, unfortunately, a large number of people, not merely Soviet
Commissars but appointed leaders of democracy, show evaluation
blocks, similar to the “reading blocks” which teachers sometimes en-
counter in young children. Such children often have normal organs
and normal intelligence: but they have never performed the mental
leap which gives to groups of letters a name, a sound, and ultimately
a meaning that, when treated as separate visual elements, they lack.
People with evaluation blocks can go through all the operations of in-
telligence, and they can reason correctly from premise to conclusion:
but they fail to attach positive and negative values to their actions, and
therefore, from their own vantage point, they can do no evil. They
reserve the term bad solely for the behavior of people or conditions
that oppose their impulses and obstruct their private plans.

Such moral idiocy, sometimes naked, sometimes disguised, is the
typical response of disintegrating civilization to its own aimlessness:
with Diogenes, it reduces human life in general to the level of a dog’s
life, or, with the amiable Dr Kinsey, it reduces human sexual needs to
their valueless common denominator with even unrelated species of ani-
mals. The most flagrant example of this devaluation was the adoption
by the democracies, during the Second World War, of the fascist prac-

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tice of random extermination, by bomb and fire and atomic fission, from
the air. This moral debasement was followed up in the United States
by a wholesale concentration, after 1945, upon instruments of geno-
cide, from the atom bomb to biological weapons of an even more wan-
ton and uncontrollable order, as a cheap substitute for war: a gross
military error and a moral sin for which many innocent Americans
may yet lose their lives. . . . But where was the moral reaction that
should have taken place, after 1945, if not during the Second World
War, against such anti-human purposes? There is but a short step from
such moral perversion to rabid madness. Only a civilization that had
everywhere extirpated its living sense of good and evil could make
such a fatal mistake.

3: THE CASE FOR PURPOSE

“What is the good of life?” This question, certainly, does not ordi-
narily occur to a person in health and prosperity, when the appetites
of the body provide their own answers: then every minor good seems
to bear witness to the general good of merely being; and to prolong
that being brings its own reward. But we know that this question, ris-
ing as a wail of despair, occurs on a grand scale when a civilization
is losing its grip; when its daily activities are not self-sustaining and
self-rewarding; when every effort meets an obstacle, when every plan
miscarries and every new turning seems to take one farther from one’s
goal, To answer that question satisfactorily at these moments — and we
are now in the midst of such a dismaying Time of Troubles — requires
both historic and cosmic perspective.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.”
No doctrine of ethical conduct that overlooks this wider destiny for
person and community has anything but a stopgap value. Though
habits of discrimination exist below the human level, the sense of
conscious participation in a durable, all-enclosing purpose is an en-
tirely human one: perhaps it came to man first in the Chaldean faith
that his life was in some way bound by iron necessity to the course of
the planets. Scores of centuries elapsed before man found evidence
for purpose, not in astrological conjunctions, but in the structure and
function of living organisms, in relation to their environment and their
projected existence through time.

Now this sense of a presiding purpose in its most common form has
been attached to a theory of divine revelation. In the general reaction

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against theology during the last three centuries the concept of purpose
itself was accordingly lost: instead of finding a purposeful world, sci-
entific materialism professed to discover only a blind accidental one.
As a result, many people still tend to overlook the immense body of
evidence in favor of purpose that has piled up since Darwin’s day.
One of the strictest and most meticulous of bio-chemists, Lawrence J.
Henderson, even demonstrated by an analysis of the properties of the
physical world that the very disposition of chemical elements, with
their specific properties, on this planet would indicate purpose, in
terms of eventual life. While accident occurs throughout nature, and
statistical order largely governs the physical world, all manifestations
of life bear evidence of a sustaining and widening purpose: a purpose
that begins to achieve consciousness in man.

Spinoza, in his Ethics, dismissed the notion of cosmic purpose, or
finalism, by saying that ^'nature has no fixed end in view, and ... all
final causes are merely fabrications of men.” During the last three
centuries that attitude became ingrained among men of science; but
Spinoza’s dismissal, for all that, was more than a little specious, be-
cause there is a great difference between having no fixed aim and hav-
ing no aim at all. To say that one has laid out at the beginning no
rigidly pre-ordained route is n^t the same as to say that one has no
provisional destination.

At the time Spinoza uttered this judgment there was, indeed, good
ground for his taking that position; for the scholastic belief in final
causes (purposeful processes and ultimate goals) had led to an at-
tempt to deduce all the forms of existence from the presumed nature
of God. Fortified by such dogmatic convictions, scholars avoided de-
tailed inquiry into cause and effect and neglected concrete observation:
they presumed, for example, that the course of the planets was a cir-
cular one, because the circle was supposedly more perfect than any
other figure; or they imputed to providence the detailed evolution of
nature, without being curious as to the methods and means, taking for
granted that the world had been designed, from the beginning, with
a single view to man’s use. In this crude form the doctrine of final
causes was an encumbrance to thought; and before it could be more
adequately re-stated it no doubt needed to be completely rejected.

Two generations ago, a fresh attempt at a more adequate formula-
tion of the theory of purposes and ends in nature was made by a
French philosopher, Paul Janet: a treatise too premature, perhaps, to
have the influence it deserved. This effort must now be carried further.

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132

in order to make intelligible the very facts that causal inquiries in
many sciences, particularly biology, have revealed. Perhaps the sim-
plest way of re-stating the doctrine of finalism is to say that in organic
change the present may be as much determined by the future as by
the past: that causal mechanisms operate in organisms precisely by
being attached to goals. At the human level, hope, aspiration, plan
and design modify the impact of past events and serve in some meas-
ure to order their further transformation. This is not to say that ends
are wholly predetermined or fixed, even in brute nature: still less to
say that the acknowledgment of purpose in nature frees one from the
operation of mechanical processes or releases the observer from de-
tailed investigation of causes and consequences. So far from making
mechanistic interpretation unnecessary, finalism does just the opposite:
it makes it more significant.

Speaking mythically, one may say that Nature works according to
plan; but, as with organic works of architecture, the plan may be re-
vised in the very middle of construction. Hence to read nature’s in-
tentions too specifically or too comprehensively is as deceptive as to
suggest that she lacks them entirely. When one conceives final causes,
one does not, as Janet points out, have to think of a hidden force or
Aristotelian entelechy, acting without physical agents: that is the straw
man erected by scientists who seek to get along without acknowledging
teleology, because this dummy is so easy to demolish. ‘‘He who says
end,” Janet goes on to say, “at the same time says means — ^that is, a
cause fit to produce such an effect. To discover this cause is in no way
to destroy the idea of end.”

Janet’s whole discussion of this problem seems to me so pertinent
that since his book is now inaccessible I shall quote a whole passage:

“We give the name of end to the last phenomenon of the series, in
reference to which all the others are co-ordinated; and this co-ordina-
tion of phenomena and actions is explained for us in the simplest man-
ner by the supposition of an anterior idea of the end. I know very well,
for instance, that if I had not beforehand the idea of a house I could
not co-ordinate all the phenomena whose conjunction is necessary to
construct a house. I know very well that it has never happened to me
to succeed in making a phrase by taking words at random from a dic-
tionary; I know that I have never succeeded in composing an air by
touching at random the keys of a piano. ... I know that I cannot
co-ordinate the elements of matter in a whole without having previously
formed the idea of that whole. In a word, I know that with me every

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133

induction, and every art, supposes a certain end, a certain finality, or
as we have expressed ourselves, a certain determination of the present
by the future.”

This issue was evaded by the leading thinkers of the nineteenth cen-
tury: theories of laissez faire, which mystically assigned to blind
chance the role of a rational providence, and to cumulative accidents
the effect of functional design, were transferred from the world of
business to that of nature. Properly rejecting Archdeacon Paley^'s con-
ception of an Eternal Clockmaker, who designed and wound up the
universe, fashionable thought also denied that clocks showed, by their
structure, an intention to tell time: it did not occur to them that the
clockmaker and the timekeeper might both be concealed in the clock
and indistinguishable from it. Unfortunately for this curious form of
mysticism, which flattered itself on being hard-headed, the facts of
teleology are conspicuous throughout the organic world. Such facts
cannot be explained away by the glib device of referring to mechanisms
of adaptation. That is a semantic contradiction. For what is a mech-
anism but a specialized contrivance for producing a predetermined re-
sult? In short, a conspicuous example of teleology.

The alternative to this slippery logic was to make Chance itself be-
come a sort of operative entelechy: this is the role that Darwin actually
assigned it, in his non-Lamarckian moments, in the guise of Natural
Selection. Chance was not merely responsible for variations in the
organism, which might lead in time to the complete transformation of
species: it was also responsible for co-adaptations, like that between
the yucca plant and the yucca moth, equally positive, equally remark-
able, in the ‘^environment,” Likewise, presumably, chance was respon-
sible for cumulative changes in a single direction, since in many in-
stances small changes would not have the effect of enhancing the pros-
pects for survival until the entire change was accomplished: that is,
until the designated co-operation had been achieved.

In short, an age that rejected miracles assigned to chance a series
of purposeful transformations quite as extraordinary, on the doctrine
of statistical probability itself, as any amount of special supernatural
intervention. And unfortunately, our ethical life during the past cen-
tury has been undermined by the vulgar assumption that this miracu-
lous but purposeless system of nature corresponds to the actual world.
That conclusion is without foundation.

Must one not hold that the argument in favor of final causes has
not been closed? Just the contrary, it is only now since we are in pos-

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session of sufficient data^ drawn from the detailed investigation of
countless biological and social phenomena, that the whole argument
for final causes, that is, for a teleology pervading all life, can be con-
fidently opened again. Once we get over this hurdle in dealing with
nature, we shall have no difficulty in applying the concepts of purpose
and ‘‘plan of life” to man.

4: TEE NATURE OF DESIGN

To say that life is by nature goal-seeking and directional, and that
human life in ever greater measure is consciously and deliberately
purposeful is not to describe except in the vaguest outline the nature
of this purpose, or to forecast, with the slightest sense of sureness,
life’s ultimate goals. At this point, he who pretends to have an ex-
planation, or even a system of explanation, not merely lacks modesty:
he shows plainly he has not taken in the dimensions of the problem
itself. By analogy, we may infer that a grand design has encompassed
all the little designs whose pattern we can trace; but that pervading
unity must be taken on faith.

True: certain nearer goals are not completely hidden from keen
analysis or deep intuition. History provides us with suggestive paral-
lels. Six centuries before the invention of airplanes and motor cars,
the monk, Roger Bacon, predicted these mechanical contrivances : from
his knowledge of processes at work in himself, he was able to anticipate
“the next development of man.” Glanvill, in the seventeenth century,
predicted the possibility of communicating at a distance without visible
material means. Where design is present, a fragment may give a suffi-
cient clue to the whole.

But since life is not a circular process, doomed to endless cycles of
recurrence, each emergence to a higher level brings with it unexpected
and unpredictable elements. Even apart from this, many purposes are
not in fact consummated; and many consummations remain cryptic
and hidden until they actually come about. The game of “cheat the
prophet” as Chesterton called it in The Napoleon of Notting Hill is
doubtless as old as prophecy. Even nature seems to change her mind:
having invented a painless method of childbirth in the marsupials, she
capriciously threw that valuable invention on the scrap-heap and elabo-
rated the clumsy, painful system still used by the placentals: highly
difficult and dangerous to a creature with man’s capacious brain case
at birth.

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135

Obviously, nature has left no blueprints around, to disclose her
purposes and her final intentions. And the process by which purpose
and design have appeared in tlie universe seems just the opposite of
that sudden miracle by which, in the Book of Genesis, God telescoped
the work of eons into six days, and created man as his crowning labor
in this swift operation. If man himself were the end nature originally
had in view, it might seem absurd — at very least downright incom-
petent — to arrive at that end by such a protracted and devious route.
The answer to this dilemma, as I have pointed out, is provided by the
doctrine of emergence: processes are not merely modified by their
ends, but, when they reach a certain point of development, they reveal
unexpected characteristics which surpass the limitations of their earlier
conditions. As in the creation of a work of art, there is a reciprocal
interaction between the artist’s intention and the means he uses: so
that the final result, no matter how firmly conceived at the beginning,
usually brings with it a considerable element of surprise. But design
is needed, before one can have events sufficiently out of the pattern
to be “unexpected” : in a world governed wholly by chance, only order
would astonish.

Every purpose is transformed by the medium and the mechanism
through which it is expressed: wherefore every distant end undergoes
a change during the time taken to reach the last stage. On the analogy
with art, as sentience and feeling and intelligence developed in the
evolution of species, the idea of man, so to say, became clearer. By
the time man emerged from earlier animal species, however, certain
irrevocable decisions had been made, some of them highly embarrass-
ing to the new creature who was to appear. Thus nature’s abortive but
stubbornly persisted-in experiment, of making the nose the dominant
sense organ, had finally been abandoned in favor of the eye and ear:
a great aid to man’s dawning intelligence. Some experiments still re-
mained in the neutral zone: plainly it made no difference to man that
his liver and kidneys were built essentially on the same pattern that
had been used in humbler creatures at a far earlier stage in evolution.
But on the other hand the close association of the organs of reproduc-
tion and excretion became a handicap to man’s increasing playfulness
in sexuality; and this was offset only in part by the heightened erotic
responsiveness of woman’s breasts. As for the upright position, with
the free arm, the mobile dexterous hand, the unobstructed binocular
vision — ^that did more to release man from his flat, four-footed ani-

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136

mality than anything else, perhaps, this side of spoken language: but
all this is so belated it seems almost a postscript.

Man, with his short span of years, is impatient: ''no sooner said
than done” is his motto. But time-saving, like economy, is a human
invention for which there is no counterpart in nature: the mills of the
Gods, proverbially, grind slowly, and except in man’s reckoning, a
million years are as a day. For purposes that work so slowly, pushing
over so many obstacles, disclosing intentions at such a remote end,
patiently "muddling through” without anything that can be called a
consistent plan of action, however purposeful each event and however
remarkably co-ordinated the general result, man lacks the necessary
parallels in his own life to aid his understanding. This weakness holds
particularly in our own time, whose pride it is to hasten all natural
processes. But the builders who designed the cathedrals at Koln and
Ulm, neither of which was finished till the nineteenth century, might
have felt a little closer to the ways of nature had they bothered to
look into them.

Let us make, then, a necessary correction in the older doctrines of
finalism. When we accept purpose and plan and goal as essential in
the barest definition of life, we do not deny the existence of causes
and events that lie outside this living system and are often, as we say,
at cross-purposes with it. Nor do we deny, within it, the necessity for
many experimental trials and rectifications. So far from saying, with
Walter Lippmann, that a plan that can be changed is not a plan, I
would say just the contrary: a plan too rigid or too brittle to be changed
does not belong either to the organic or the human world, for life can-
not function effectively within such hardened molds. All organic
change partakes of creation; and our clue to creation comes, not
through the investigation of mechanical sequences viewed by an ex-
ternal spectator or operator, but through the observation of purposive
action in man’s own creative acts. Without reference to these higher
processes in man, one cannot perhaps make an adequate interpretation
of what goes on in earlier stages of organic development.

Since these concepts are still unfamiliar, I must make use of a
homely illustration. Take the creative act of writing. I do not know,
at the moment I write this sentence, exactly what my next sentence is
going to be, though an anticipatory feeling of what will carry the
thought further has already formed. But I know, even as I now type
it, that it is the result, not merely of what I have said in the previous
sentence— and in turn in the hook as so far written — ^but also of what

THE BASIS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ][37

I have in mind further to express in order to complete the general
thesis of the book. This sentence might have taken many alternative
forms without departing from the plan; and one of those forms has
now actually appeared; but whatever form I might choose — and at
the moment I said it tlie words came as a somewhat unexpected revela-
tion — its character as well as its meaning is determined by its place
in the structure of the book and the extent to which it participates in
and furthers the overall purpose of the book.

Before the book is finished that sentence may be deleted; yet it will,
by having once served as a link in the chain of argument, have per-
formed a genuine purpose, even though it disappears: it would still,
in other words, have been molded at its point of origin by a future
goal and in turn contribute to the fulfillment of that goal. The meaning
of the single sentence, in other words, derives from the larger design;
yet even the author could not describe in advance all the details of that
larger design, for the design itself will not be coherently organized or
effectively expressed, until the last page is ready for the printer. In
other words, it is characteristic of purposive organization that, though
the future determines the present, the future itself is subject, both in
detail and even in the overall pattern, to many further modifications.
Yet even if I abandoned the book in the middle, the words, as so far
written, would have been determined by the goal I originally set be-
fore myself. That degree of purpose would exist.

The acceptance of a pervasive teleology or finalism, uniting the cos-
mic and the human, now becomes our operational postulate and living
faith. All life is purposive and goal-seeking; and human life con-
sciously participates in a more universal purpose and seeks goals
that lie beyond the mere survival, in a state of animal toi'pidity, of
the species. Though many of the details of this teleological system are
substantiated by observation, the purpose of the whole, the grand de-
sign, cannot be established either by experiment or by observation —
and neither, for that matter, can it be refuted or discredited by such
means as long as living organisms survive.

All one need say is that if purpose exists in the basic structure of
things, it calls for a far less incredible succession of miracles than a
world subject wholly to random processes, which has nevertheless
achieved such abundant manifestations of purpose and design. In the
larger terms of existence, both purpose and chance lie beyond effec-
tive demonstration; but it is more sensible to admit the existence of
purpose, modified by fortuities and necessities, than to suppose that

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chance is uppermost and then be compelled to avert one’s eyes from
every evidence of purposive transformation.

At all events, we begin perhaps to see why the sense of a pervasive
purpose that encompasses all creation enters into every reasonable
definition of the good. This purpose existed in nature, before man
identified nature with the larger order of his own being. A purposeless
life is in fact a contradiction; for as soon as life becomes purposeless
the very possibility of its continued existence comes to an end: in man,
that irrationality and futility bring about self-destruction. Cancer is,
from the standpoint of the organism, prolific but purposeless growth,
and all purposeless growth must produce death.

By the same token, a purpose that reaches beyond any immediate
satisfaction and gives direction to the whole course of life, or that
even spans the lives of successive generations, is a powerful agent of
social and personal integration. To prefer the durable to the ephemeral^
the consistent to the inconsistent, is the essence of ‘‘character.” That
was what the Jewish prophets, from Moses onward, meant when they
sought to interpret God’s intentions to man, and to make man’s daily
arrangements fit into the larger scheme of probation and salvation
that was, according to their view, being worked out in history. Though
they often crudely over-simplified this vision and doctrine, by making
reward and punishment more swift and sure than they actually are,
they at least emphasized the fact that the good is no wholly self-con-
tained entity and no purely human illusion: every good is the vehicle,
not merely of immediate personal fulfillment — sometimes indeed that
is withheld — ^but of continued growth and development and renewal.

The understanding contemplation of the ultimate goal enables it to
be to some extent manifested and realized in the present moment: if
in one sense life involves perpetual struggle and self-transcendence,
there is at the same time a quiet pool of being in which the most dis-
tant goal is mirrored; so that even if frustrated or cut short in his
efforts, the person’s ultimate fulfillment is nevertheless partly realiz-
able in the acts that lead to that goal. No small part of the function
of art is to bring those moments into the busy marketplace of life.
What one calls the timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the
transformation of endless becoming into being. Without allowing for
this realization of purpose in the active present — ^what Emerson prob-
ably meant when he said that life was a matter of having good days —
a doctrine based on purpose alone might, like totalitarian communism,
subordinate all immediate personal goods to the ultimate distant goal.

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139

By over-emphasis of a purely compensatory after-life Christianity for
long made the same error.

The binding force of an ethical system based on purpose has been
dramatically confirmed in the history of the Jews: its practical con-
summation in our own time perhaps merits our special note. Scattered
to the four corners of the earth, the Jews, during the long period of
the Dispersion, still retained their faith in a divine promise: in the
restoration of Jerusalem, in the advent of a Messiah, and finally, in
the prophecy of Isaiah, of the coincident coming of a day when the
nations will no longer war against one another, but join together in
ways of peace.

All these purposes may well, at many grievous times during the last
two millenniums, have seemed delusional projections: the reactions of
desperate souls to unfortunate political and social conditions: reactions
bearing every mark of a collective neurosis. By holding to these pur-
poses, the Jews kept together as a people under conditions that would
have ground any less hopeful nation out of existence: that itself would
constitute a pragmatic justification of purpose. But these goahseeking
people have done more than hold together, while tlieir conquerors and
oppressors, given to ephemeral satisfactions and immediate aims, van-
ished. Today the Jews have performed the incredible feat of returning
as a unified political group to their native home in Palestine. Thus a
collective purpose, working over an almost cosmic stretch of time, has
brought its own fulfillment. By that fact, every contributory ceremony
and ritual and prayer, every hardship and sacrifice, has been retro-
spectively justified. The mere existence of Israel today is a testimonial
to the dynamics of purposive development. If the Greeks had had such
a vision of life, they might have left an even deeper impression upon
modern man.

So far, then, we have established three large criteria for an ethics
of human development: Reverence for life in all its manifestations.
The development of evaluation and selection, of a constant discrim-
ination between good and bad, as an inherent need of human life. Fi-
nally, the acknowledgment of the purposive nature of all living proc-
esses, and the conscious formulation of ideals, goals, and plans as
being an essential carrying over of natural teleology into the develop-
ment of man. By entering into purposes that transcend the limits of
any single life, sometimes of any historic period, man endows his own
limited needs and values with a meaning that outlives their temporary
satisfaction or their equally temporary defeat.

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5 : THE ORGANIC HIERARCHY

Man’s goods spring directly out of his vital and social needs, even
before he elaborates the cultural forms and the personal values that
widen their province in life and ensure their continuity. At their point
of origin, these needs are on the same level; some may be more im-
perious than others, but they all work equally for tlie maintenance of
the organism and keep it in the state of dynamic equilibrium necessary
for growth and self-fulfillment

Within the body itself there is a hierarchy of functions, however,
and this hierarchic order leaves its imprint on many remoter areas of
life. There are, for instance, supernumeraries, like the appendix and
tonsils, trusty domestic servants, like the stomach and bowels, willing
manual workers and clerks, like hands and legs; and their status and
office are well defined. One may get along famously without one’s ton-
sils; and reasonably well without an arm or a leg; but if one is de-
prived of even a square inch of the frontal cortex, the entire organism
may be thrown completely out of adjustment. There is no question as
to what is the dominant function in the body, or in what direction the
organic hierarchy leads. The highest functions are those of the nervous
system; and they culminate in the over-developed and still only partly
used organ that is responsible for the effective working of the whole.
Common American speech recognizes this fact, when responses are
tardy or reflexes fumble, in the sharp admonition; “Use your head!”

Ethical conduct affirms this organic hierarchy of functions in the
body and develops it further, in application to the person and the com-
munity, by discriminating between higher and lower ends. Unfortu-
nately, at this point one historic doctrine after another has been tempted
into a too easy solution based on the simple dualism between body and
soul. This overlooks the fact that it is within the body itself that the
qualitative difference between higher and lower is first established.
Nietzsche sought to make high the equivalent of “high caste”: what-
ever people of birth and breeding and aristocratic purpose proclaimed
as fit for their own kind; while for him the low consisted in the values
to which the poor, the humble, the conquered clung.

Both distinctions are false, for the natural hierarchic order cuts un-
der such factitious historic divisions. The human organism functions
well only when the subordinate organs are in harmony with the higher
processes, not in a state of mute resentful rebellion. Between the lower

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141

and higher centers a continuous traffic goes on: the first supplies energy
and vitality, feeling and emotion, to all that the mind undertakes, thus
enlisting the active aid of the whole organism; the second makes use
of its special capacity for abstraction, symbolization, co-ordination,
and vigilant anticipation to bring the organism into fuller relation with
other men, with the environment, and ultimately with more universal
processes.

Now, the dominance of the lower functions by the higher ones is
always fitful and uncertain: the conscious, rational mind, established
later than the lower functions, is like a wise ruler, resisted by his un-
ruly subjects, who would prefer to be left alone in their gross cus-
toms, without having their attention directed to great projects for the
improvement of the whole community, to which they will have to con-
tribute their taxes and their work. A drink of gin or a depressing sight
may impair the finest kind of mental creativity: fatigue, pressure, repe-
tition, may reverse the natural order and put the subordinate organs
or the reflexes in a position of control. This explains the humiliating
fact about illness: that it upsets the natural dominance of the higher
functions. The diseased organ, the lung or heart or liver, often takes
possession of the whole personality and overpowers it, putting the mind
itself at the service of the ailment. Thomas Mann exquisitely revealed
this transmogrification in The Magic Mountain.

Judged from tlie standpoint of survival, the most indispensable life-
need, and therefore in one sense the surest good, is air: if deprived of
air for as little as three minutes, most men will die. Suppose, however,
one were granted five hundred years of continuous life on the sole con-
dition that all one’s natural functions were paralyzed and one were
kept “alive” in an iron lung, committed to the single function of
breathing — ^who would not reject life on those terms? Air is indeed
vital to man ; but not for the sake of moi'e air. When the brains of the
aged begin to break down, they sometimes maintain a vegetative ex-
istence, without memory or hope; and with what lingering spark of
mind remains they will often resent tliis state as life’s final indignity:
they eat, they breathe, they move, often in perfect health: but in a
meaningless world. That is neither life nor happiness.

“Happiness,” as tliat wise old observer of life, John Butler Yeats,
once put it in a letter (1909), “happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure
nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are
growing.” To that observation an ethics of development would add one
further note; the means for continuous growth are provided, not in

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the physical organism as a whole, but in the higher functions. Up to
the point that bodily deterioration undermines the higher functions,
their expansion and renewal are the main conditions for a good life:
a life of increasing sensitiveness, deeper love, richer meaning.

The essence of wisdom, then, is to pay sufficient attention to the
lower functions to ensure their fullest contribution to the whole proc-
ess of growth; but not to allow them to usurp the place of the higher
functions or to disrupt the whole. Any special attention one may pay
to the lower functions — as in fortifying the body by hard exercise —
must be for the sake of giving more scope to the higher functions. But
with reason, the ancient Athenians disparaged the professional ath-
lete, whose personality became an appendage to his muscular skill;
hence indeed their distrust for all forms of specialization, which give
to a single function the over-riding place that reason alone, in their
scheme, should occupy.

Does one solve the ethical problem, then, simply by arranging the
goods of life in a vertical order, as Plato did in The Laws, observing
that ‘Hhe right way is to place the goods of the soul first and highest in
the scale, always assuring temperance to be the condition of them;
and to assign the second place to the goods of the body and the third
place to money and property”? This seems a convenient practical di-
vision; but it is in fact an imperfect one; for it fails to do justice to
the need for organic harmony or to suggest any principle for achiev-
ing it: even more serious, its order is a static one and does not pro-
vide for those occasions when the lower functions must be in ascend-
ancy to restore balance. Christian doctrine, for example, followed
Plato closely in differentiating between higher and lower qualities: so
far well. But in the Christian’s extravagant pursuit of disembodied
virtue he often upset the unity of the personality, causing inner divi-
sion and neurosis: so much so that Ignatius Loyola, that subtle and
wary psychologist, was always quick to caution novices against ex-
cessive zeal in mortification, as no less hostile to spiritual perfection
than over-indulgence.

The servile functions exist for the sake of the self-governing ones:
the automatic and habitual for the selective or spontaneous: the re-
flexes for the sake of the released functions, which lend themselves to
art and thought: so much is clear. But the higher can no more do with-
out the lower than the lower can do without the higher, or rather
somewhat less: for the physical body often survives in old age when
all the higher processes of thought and emotion have disappeared. If

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143

the lower self must not dominate the higher, neither must the higher
seek to extirpate the lower: for at that moment it removes the ener-
gies needed for its own propulsion. The increasing dominance of the
higher functions, which is the condition for all truly human develop-
ment, is not for the sake of suppressing the lower functions, but of
using them more fully for ends that they themselves cannot encom-
pass; for choices that, left to themselves, they could not make.

In short, the meaning of hierarchic organization in both the person
and in society is to secure conditions favorable to freedom: to release
the person from automatism and give him an increasing degree of
self-direction. Freedom for man in large part is an effort to escape the
age-old stereotypes of his lower functions and to exercise constant
choice and discrimination : what applies in the personality applies also
in the community. In no sense does freedom mean the casting off of
restraints, the destruction of inhibitions, or the denial of duties and
responsibilities. Man loses his freedom through poverty, ignorance,
and disease; and again, he may lose his freedom through the over-
development of a single organ or function, or through over-commit-
ment to mechanical or social processes not under the control of the
personality. That is why money and property, up to a certain point,
are as much a condition for the development of the human personality
as direct access to the non-material elements in a culture, and to pre-
tend that their absence does not matter is hypocrisy or dishonesty.

In view of man’s hierarchic internal organization of needs and func-
tions, the place of freedom in the moral life becomes plain. Man is
not born free: at the moment of birth he is the helpless prey of his
reflexes, and the passive recipient of the conditions imposed on him
by his family and his culture. He can exercise no initiative: make no
decisions. His education, up to the point where it meets arrest, is a
slow induction into the possibilities of freedom: a transfer of restraint
from the outer world to the inner man, and a progressive increase of
choice, as intelligence and experience and imagination widen the
range of his vision and increase the number of alternatives before
him. Increasing selectivity and increasing self-direction are the re-
wards of man’s capacity for freedom: and all his organic processes are
so arranged, as Coghill and Angyal have shown, as to assure the ulti-
mate dominance of the higher over the lower functions and to make
the life he thereby develops an infinitely more rewarding one than
that which other creatures, or men themselves at a lower stage in their
development, have been able to live.

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144

Even a purely physiological analysis of man’s behavior, then, es-
tablishes the fact that there are higher and lower goods; and that the
higher goods are those leading toward freedom and multiple choices,
toward esthetic sensitivity and symbolic interpretation, toward the
domination of the parts by the whole and the subordination of organic
functions to a guiding purpose: in fine, toward the creation of a mean-
ingful and valuable world. The slightest impairment of activity in the
forebrain, either through drugs or overt injury, first destroys the sym-
bolic functions and the ability to co-ordinate, as Goldstein and von
Monakov have demonstrated: the world becomes less meaningful and
less valuable: along with this goes a breakdown of inhibition, that
capacity upon which all positive choices are based.

One of the reasons, perhaps, why there has been a widespread
ethical disintegration in our whole civilization is that we have created
an interlocking machinery of schools, factories, newspapers, and armies
that have artificially destroyed the higher centers, have impaired the
power of choice, have reduced the symbolic functions to an almost
reflex level, and have removed the capacity to co-ordinate from the
person to the machine process : the whole system powerfully re-enforced
by narcotics and other drugs, from alcohol and tobacco to marijuana,
cocaine, phenobarbital and aspirin. The utopia of the conditioned
reflex.

The final degradation in this dethronement of the higher functions
consists in the systematic confusion of names, which both Nazism and
Stalinist communism have cunningly employed. By the same token,
the first step toward freedom will be a new respect for the symbol, a
purification and clarification of language itself, an abstention from
unclean slogans and conditioned verbal reflexes. The death of the ad-
vertising agency and the propaganda bureau will be one of the surest
signs of the birth of a new society.

6: THE CONTROL OF QUANTITY

The constant discrimination between good and bad, and the unre-
mitting pursuit of goodness are vital requirements for human devel-
opment. He who would deny the importance of these efforts would
abolish man’s very humanity. To substitute power for goodness is sim-
ply to turn a single aspect of life into an absolute: an error which
denies the essential fact about life, that all its functions and goods
are inter-related and organically conditioned by each other. The obli-

THE BASIS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

145

gation to recognize the good and to pursue good is absolute. But goods
themselves are relative: each has its time, its place, its function, in
the economy of the whole. If goods must be chosen and pursued with
respect to their ultimate capacity to raise the level of human develop-
ment, they must also be chosen in the right order and the right quantity.

While qualitative discrimination is essential it is not enough: there
must be quantitative discrimination at the same time. In addition to
affixing a plus or minus sign to all experience, one must add a numer-
ical indicator for ‘^how much?” Now the present age with its scientific
background and its pervasive money accountancy takes pride in the
fact that it is quantity-minded: yet both piety and cynicism have,
from quite different motives, overlooked the radical way in which
goodness is conditioned by quantity. Both the absolute pacifist, un-
willing to take any life, and the complete nihilist, contemptuous of all
life, unite, for example, in their refusal to admit any difference be-
tween the restrained and directed violence of war and the unlimited
violence and random extermination of genocide, as practiced in so-
called obliteration bombing, whether by incendiary bombs or atom
bombs. But just as the practice of enslaving prisoners was morally
superior to killing the victim outright, so war itself, even in its in-
sanely destructive modern forms, is still morally preferable to ran-
dom extermination and random destruction. War at least limits the
area of violence and murder to designated, identifiable groups. Geno-
cide knows no limits of any kind: it accordingly flouts the dictum Kant
uttered in his Essay on Universal Peace, that one should never em-
ploy a method in war that would make it impossible to make peace
with one’s enemy. Here the absence of quantitative judgment has led
to further debasement; for to kill a million men is not the same as
to kill a thousand men: it is precisely a thousand times worse.

The pursuit of the good involves one in constant estimations of
quantity; and the disciplined control of quantity is therefore one of the
marks of the maturing person. The vulgar hold that one cannot have
too much of a good thing; but their own experience, if only they re-
flected upon it, would show that this is untrue. Whether a thing is
good or bad often depends in no small measure upon how much of
it one takes or consumes or does. Over-indulgence in the appetite for
food or drink or sexual intercourse is normally, in due time, self-
correcting: indigestion, headaches, lethargy, impotence curb the over-
driven impulse and restore the organic balance. There are, however,
as Herbert Spender observed long ago, people who indulge themselves

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

unduly in scientific pursuits; people who, like Dar^vin, on his own pa-
thetic confession, let their emotional responses dry up, in their very
concentration upon one of their higher functions alone. So even
the higher goods, if quantitatively overdone, can turn into their oppo-
site: a fact Plato recognized when he said that “temperance must be
a condition of them.” The virtuous must occasionally recall The Preach-
er’s sanative injection: “Be not virtuous overmuch: why shouldst thou
destroy thyself?”

Now both Confucius and Aristotle were aware of the need for quan-
titative discrimination as one of the chief components of an active
mode of ethics: both the Greeks and the Chinese observed the doctrine
of the Golden Mean: they were wary of extremes, even in matters that
were excellent and estimable in themselves. But to be golden the mean
must be no mere mathematical mid-point: the useful mean takes into
account the time, the place, the circumstance, the organic capacity.
By causing men to follow its general counsel of moderation, this doc-
trine helps to rectify in some degree even qualitative misjudgments ;
for evil, if not manifested in inordinate amounts, can be assimilated
and overcome.

The doctrine of the mean, however, is subject to one correction: it
must in practice be limited by its own canon. There is a golden mean
even in applying the golden mean; for to reduce every action and
every impulse to a nicely regulated not-too-little-not-too-much is to
overlook those occasions when, in the interest of an eventual equi-
librium, one must abandon this too-even form of control. As a rule,
eight hours of work is more than enough for a day, and in some pro-
fessions, like writing, possibly twice too much. But in an emergency
one must work around the clock, and if one held back in the interests
of moderation one would forfeit the very life one seeks to conserve.
There are often brief periods in life — military combat or creative
work in art or science — ^when to live a balanced and harmonious exist-
ence is impossible: at those moments, moderation itself becomes the
dangerous extreme. In so far as ethics provides a sound guide to liv-
ing, it must have life’s own attributes: its pliability, its adaptiveness,
its sensitiveness to the occasion. “Wisdom,” old Theognis said, “is
supple: folly keeps a groove.”

Now modern civilization, during the last three centuries, has given
itself over to quantitative production, and has thrown off the natural
limits that once existed on the food supply, the birth-rate, the amount
of power a single individual could exercise or detonate. As a result.

THE BASIS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

147

the control of quantity has become one of the dominant moral prob-
lems of our age: a problem all the more difficult to solve because we
have treated our permissive ability to remove quantitative limits as a
command. At every stage of production we enlarge, we expand, we
multiply, we accelerate: but we lack both the will and the means to di-
rect the instruments we have created in the interests of life; and when
they threaten life, to contract them and to bring them to a halt.

Precisely because we are now capable of inundating the planet with
more human bodies than we can nourish, with more printed matter
than we can assimilate, with more knowledge than we can apply in-
telligently, our whole culture is in the position of the Sorcerer’s Ap-
prentice: we do not know how to decrease or to turn off the power we
once fatally invoked, and can now only increase. Until we master that
lesson, all life is in danger.

In short: qualitative discrimination and selection and quantita-
tive control are both essential elements in an ethics of development.
Where their practice is not deeply ingrained in custom and habit and
conscious self-direction, a disordered life will result. Who in our time
has not witnessed and participated in this disorder? — often with a
false feeling of emancipation and pride, coming directly from the fact
that we had overthrown old rules and norms on the supposition that
they had no place in a universe interpreted by the sciences. And one
does not have to seek far to detect such sinners: one need only hon-
estly examine one’s own life. Once the constant need for discrimina-
tion and self-direction is admitted, as an unfailing condition for a
truly human life, every day becomes a day of reckoning.

CHAPTER VI. BEYOND MORAL AMBIGUITIES

1: “MODERN MAN CAN DO NO WRONG^’

“Is it not evident,” wrote the painter, Eugene Delacroix, a century
ago, “that progress, toward good or toward evil, has brought society
to the edge of an abyss into which it may very well fall, to make way
for a state of complete barbarism?”

Actually, our age now hovers on the verge of that abyss: part of
our society has already plunged into it; and the condition of man
therefore calls for radical improvement. Unless that improvement
touches every part of our culture, reversing the movement of many
dominant forces, transforming our institutions, above all, producing
an inner change in men and women that will radiate in every direc-
tion, a more complete disintegration may come about. Now that certain
life-preservative taboos have generally broken down our present lead-
ers would be capable, in a conflict between the nations, of turning the
whole planet into a cindery radioactive waste, or into one vast plague-
infested lazaretto, under the wholly insane conviction that a “victory”
bought at this price would be worth the victor’s having. Scores of
bombed cities and millions of displaced persons, starved, bitter, hope-
less, are prophetic witnesses to the possiblity of our creating a univer-
sal wasteland.

Bu| the invisible breakdown in our civilization is more insidious,
and possibly even more destructive: the erosion of values, the dissipa-
tion of humane purposes, the denials of any distinction between good
or bad, right or wrong, the reversion to sub-human levels of conduct
under the pretext that man’s progressive emergence from his instinc-
tual state has no significance. In a society whose values are still opera-
tive, the bad man knows that he defies society and his own better na-
ture when he robs or kills or rapes: sometimes he even courts punish-
ment after the act, because part of his self still accepts the standard
his conduct has defied. In a nihilistic order there is a complete un-

BEYOND MORAL AMBIGUITIES

149

consciousness of guilt: who can indeed admit responsibility for evil
acts, if he does not admit the existence of evil?

The social breakdown of our time has shown itself in at least three
ways: philosophically, ethically, and politically. Philosophically, this
breakdown has disclosed itself in the cult of general nihilism, a cull
which rejects the reality of those fundamental discriminations between
good and bad, between higher and lower, that are the very bases of
human conduct. At first defacing only values, nihilism must, to re-
main theoretically consistent, also deny meanings, since meaning
emerges from human existence by the same process that creates and
confirms values: by providing consistent clues to life-furthering proc-
* esses and actions and states. The cult of Da-da, which took form in the
twenties in esoteric intellectual circles, was the perfect symbol of this
philosophy: it treated all attempts at significant expression as pompous
and irrelevant. The final achievement of this nihilism, if it did not
halt itself on its way to extinction by attributing to power the sole
meaning of life, would be a stuttering helpless imbecility. Instead of
going that far, it debases every concept it touches: witness Nazi an-
thropology, Aryan physics, Stalinist science. The ultimate effect of
believing that values have no meaning is to proclaim that meanings
have no value. At that point the truth and the will-to-believe become
indistinguishable: even the capacity to lie effectively is lost.

Politically, our moral breakdown has taken precisely the turn pre-
dicted by Henry Adams fifty years ago, and by Oswald Spengler, with
even more brutal realism, after the First World War. This state has
brought with it the general debasement of justice, the disregard of
law, the attempt to concentrate power in a ruthless minority which,
under whatever convenient ideological mask, sometimes fascism,
sometimes communism, sometimes capitalism or nationalism, seeks
only to perpetuate the lethal conditions of its own existence. The notion
that justice is but a convenient disguise for naked power was formu-
lated by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, echoing a popular thesis
•at the beginning of another period of violent social disintegration; and
that same notion has now spread from active exponents, like Lenin
and Hitler, to many lesser practitioners in our society.

Now, if those who govern are not bound by law, if they are not
under continuous moral judgment, based on historic precedents and
common human standards that transcend any particular social order
or caste, then physical force will entirely displace moral authority,
instead of merely supplementing it when the latter is too weak to pre-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

vail. As a consequence terrorism, torture, arbitrary compulsion, have
already been elevated in many states into normal methods of political
government, and every state tends to become a police state: witness
the ominous growth and ubiquitous pressure of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in the United States: an agency whose operations are
immune to public scrutiny and may presently, like those of its totali-
tarian counterparts, be beyond control.

The cult of nihilism thus tends to issue, by swift steps rather than
slow, into a cult of violence and methodical terror, expressing a total
contempt for life. And we should be deceived if we clung to the be-
lief that these results have appeared only in totalitarian countries. In
an active or latent state, nihilism is at work throughout our civilization.

This brings us to another set of symptoms that indicate the gen-
eral breakdown in Western civilization. In many areas, we are now
faced with the dissolution of long-established habits of communica-
tion, communion, and co-operation: the narrowing of intercourse to
people of the same isolated nation, race, religion, or class: even the
progressive disappearance of genuinely international congresses and
meetings, at the very moment we create a vehicle, in the UNESCO, to
produce the maximum amount of common effort among educational
and scientific groups. Not merely has there been a wiping out of pre-
viously established collaborations: positive barriers have now been
raised, of an even more impenetrable character: barriers which oper-
ate against the free interchange of opinions, the free rivalry of op-
posing beliefs, the free flow of ideas, to say nothing of more com-
monplace traffic that also acts as a solvent of prejudice and provin-
ciality.

During the century before 1914 our planet had become, to a de-
gree never achieved before, a single unit: indeed a worldwide com-
munity, beyond the limit of all previous empires and civilizations. An
invisible network of equitable law and widely accepted custom cov-
ered the planet: the scholar, the financier, the actor, the harvest hand,
the hotel waiter, the tourist, traveled in peace and security throughout
the planet, without any other credential than the fact that they were
human beings. Violence had become so petty, so sporadic, so unthink-
able, that the hero of H, G. Wells’s novel, The New Machiavelli,
writing in exile, boasts that no despotic ruler could keep him from
freely expressing his ideas. That illusion did not survive the First
World War.

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151

Now, in all organisms, upbuilding processes and breaking-down
processes are constantly taking place. What is true of life in general,
is likewise true of man’s communal and individual life. There has
never been a period, probably, when certain symptoms of moral
weakness could not be detected: for even a stable, fully integrated
society may, by its very stability, fail to meet the problems and pres-
sures brought about by the need for further development, the most
constant of all human needs. Out of its very rigidity such a society
may contribute to moral relapses. Healthy organisms, moreover, may
often show local impairments and deteriorations; yet, as in a body
attacked by a fatal disease, the larger number of organs may, till the
end, function vigorously and partly overcome the failure of the weak
organ. Even today, possibly three-quarters of our society is still organ-
ically healthy.

Unfortunately the presence of this large amount of healthy social
tissue is perhaps unduly reassuring: while the buildings show unbroken
windows, while the trains run punctually, while the markets are still
heaped with food, it is hard to realize that the forces of disintegration
may already be getting the upper hand. But the fact is that the most
disturbing symptom of disintegration is an inner one. Whai keeps
men from recognizing the danger of their present state is not merely
the old stereotypes of progress, but a more sinister belief, implicit if
not avowed: Modern man can do no wrong. Unable to discriminate
between good and evil, incapable of taking moral responsibility, un-
willing to accept blame, confusing goodness with power and evil with
impotence, turning a lurking sense of guilt over his sins into the only
sin he will acknowledge — doing all this, modern man has undermined
all his solid foundations. While the physical superstructure may still
look sound, the underpinnings of value and meaning have been eaten
away.

The healthy organs of modern society are happily still of service
and may eventually help save us: fortunately there are still many
sound institutions and virtuous people even in countries like Russia
and Germany and Japan whose physical existence has been most se-
verely impaired. But if we are to re-establish the foundations of our
humanity, we must first re-acquire those essential capacities of feeling
and discrimination that will direct men toward the right and the good
and the spiritually profitable: in short, toward life. The conviction
that “modem man can do no wrong” is the ethical source of his bru-
talities, his destructions, his self-contempt, his ultimate suicide.

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2: CONDITIONS FOR MORAL RENEWAL

The conditions for re-establishing ethical values in our civilization
are those under which conscious moral direction originally came into
existence. As respects qualities, the first essential change in attitude
is an increase in sensitiveness and fellow-feeling: the precise opposite
of Nietzsche’s inverted morality of the superman. Not Be hard! but
Be tender and sensitive. In the most concrete and literal sense, the
moral life needs mothering. To be in a condition to do well with one’s
fellows or to pursue one’s own self-development, one must be touched
to the depths by the impression our conduct makes on others: to feel
sorrow when they are in grief, disappointment when they are frus-
trated, joy when they are uplifted: even to sympathize with their hos-
tility and aggression, to the extent of being able to recognize how far
one’s own conduct shows similar traits and is in fact partly responsible
for producing it. These are the first lessons of parenthood: without
such love, the next step, toward self-discipline and responsibility, the
acceptance of the super-ego, will not be made.

By contrast, the most deadly sin is that of cutting oneself off from
other men. Brutality, unfeelingness, insensitiveness, isolationism, the
paranoid rejection of fellowship, are the enemies of the moral life:
hardness of heart, as every moralist has proclaimed, is another name
for moral deadness. Common experience confirms this judgment: the
worst crimes are those committed by people who, through ideological
or chemical means, have blunted their natural responses. The very
name assassin reminds one of those professional murderers who pre-
pared for their crime by eating hashish, just as their modern counter-
parts in gangsterdom go to their violent rendezvous after taking co-
caine or heroin. These extreme examples prove the conditions under
which vice and crime normally flourish. Even hardened criminals may
still do violence to their nature when they kill in cold blood. Only
those who have spent time in a totalitarian extermination camp, or its
equivalent — see Dostoyevsky’s account of Jiis Siberian imprisonment
— ^know how low human conduct can sink through sheer hardness of
heart.

But we must be equally on guard against insensitiveness that is pro-
moted, not by drugs or by the animal effort to survive, but by ideo-
logical means. The fanatic Marxist who characterizes members of the
bourgeoisie as vermin, like the Nazi who so characterized the Jews

BEYOND MORAL AMBIGUITIES

153

and the Poles, finds it easy to take the next step: to exterminate his
victims like vermin. Even without warped ideological support, this
hardness may be promoted by the psychological distance between cul-
tures — ^the curse of imperialism — or even by the physical distance
which permits aviators to drop bombs on innocent men and women,
with no sense of any result except the pattern of the explosion: this is
also to exterminate one’s victims like vermin. The willingness to par-
ticipate in cruelty and murder, when presented in mystery novels and
radio programs and “^comics” is not, it goes without saying, the only
source of contemporary crime: but who can doubt that the mental ha-
bituation to violence so provided makes it easier to engage in both in-
dividual and collective crimes, or to turn our faces away, indifferently,
when they are committed.

In the phase of disintegration, each civilization seems to find a spe-
cial way of keeping to its downward course by reversing the values of
life: unable to identify and promote the good, it embraces a variety
of evils and calls them good. What the Roman gladiatorial spectacles
did for the Romans, our age has achieved through motor races and
plane exhibitions, designed to produce maimings and deaths, by wres-
tling matches and boxing bouts in which brutality is far more visible
than sportsman-like skill, in concentration on more lethal weapons
of war, instead of on measures that would produce co-operation and
peace. But the first step toward moral renewal should be plain; we
must overcome the present cult of callousness; and we must abandon
the morality of the “dead pan,” which characterizes our whole style
of life, cutting off every warmer manifestation of human feeling and
turning unemotionality and impassiveness into the only accepted val-
ues. Our fear of emotions, our habit of treating normal emotions as
deplorably sentimental and strong emotions as simply hysterical or
funny, betrays fundamentally our fear of life.

What our civilization needs today, as a condition for increasing hu-
man maturity and for inner renewal, is the cultivation of an exquisite
sensitivity and an incomparable tenderness. . . . Unnameable horrors
have paraded before us and worse evils threaten because we have been
unable to wipe the blank stare of indifference from our stony tearless
faces. We are too numb even to hate what is hateful. Lacking the ca-
pacity to feel, when feeling ig an imperative condition for living on a
human plane, we also lack tiie capacity for action. Those who most
prided themselves on their absence of righteous anger and anxiety,
when the Nazis threatened to subdue the world to their systematic

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

barbarism, were precisely those who lacked even an animal sense of
danger: their coolness and impassiveness betrayed their failure to rec-
ognize life’s demands.

No nation perhaps is collectively hardened down to the level of its
criminal or psychopathic elements. Even the German people, though
steeped in a brutal authoritarian tradition, sought to hide from them-
selves the hideous practices of the extermination camps. But a tend-
ency toward the psychopathic, if one may judge by the growing occur-
rence of vicious crimes in otherwise normal children and adolescents,
is far more serious today than people ordinarily estimate. My own ex-
perience as a teacher in getting student reactions to situations that in-
volved the acceptance or the moral reprobation of senseless criminal
violence, makes me believe that perhaps as much as a third of our
student population of college grade may, for all practical purposes,
be considered moral imbeciles, or at least moral illiterates. So poorly
have the moral values that still remain partly operative been trans-
mitted to these students that they are potential, if not active, delin-
quents. Though they have been screened by intelligence tests and per-
sonality tests before entering college, they have not yet acquired the
moral values and purposes that would enable them to function as full-
grown human beings. Masked by more adult habits that they share
with the rest of the community, their values remain infantile, if not
brutally criminal.

The qualities of vigilance and wakefulness were rightly emphasized
by the Christian Fathers as essential to moral life: everything that
induces anesthesia or lulls one to sleep is an obstacle to moral devel-
opment. But to fortify sensitiveness still another quality is needed:
sobriety. Not to be unduly elated at success, not to be unduly depressed
by defeat, to preserve equanimity in the face of danger, and modera-
tion and reserve in embracing wealth and good fortune: these are the
characteristics of sobriety. They are symbolized for us by the figure
of Socrates, he who could arise from the longest drinking bout with
a steady head: he whose conduct at Potidaea, as described in The
Symposium, was as untroubled as his behavior on the last day before
his death. A sufficient increase in sensitiveness to re-establish moral
values, without a proportionate strengthening of sobriety, might result
in pain and anxiety that would nullify the capacity for effective
response.

With sobriety go two other qualities needed for moral renewal. One
of them is the cultivation of far-sightedness: the common-sense re-

BEYOND MORAL AMBIGUITIES

155

quirement for an effective attachment to ultimate ends and goals. Now
ethical conduct often has its rewards and fulfillments in the present:
it is an academic superstition to hold that it is always better to defer
immediate satisfactions in favor of remote ones — as if the remote did
not at some point become immediate. But far-sightedness is necessary
in order to do justice to immediate goods in their proper order and to
anticipate their probable consequences: the moral bankruptcy of
Neville Chamberlain and the moral capacity of Winston Churchill,
with respect to the immediate issues of war and peace in 1939 , de-
rived largely from the short-sightedness of the first and the far-sighted-
ness of the second. The other necessary quality is timeliness. The good
consists not only in the right quality in the right quantity in the right
order; it must also be brought into action at the right time and place.
Misplaced or inopportune virtues are often as much an obstacle to
human development as positive evil would be.

But the overwhelming need to renew moral values in our civiliza-
tion, and to establish, by nurture and education, the habits that grow
out of them, should not lead us into the error of moralism. Conduct
may be, as Matthew Arnold used to say, three-fourths of life; but the
aim of ethics is not simply to promote good conduct: its essential aim
is to further life; and this means something more than the capacity
for ethical evaluations and acts. Here lies the mistake of all pharisee-
ism and to some extent one of the recurrent errors of religion itself.
The vigilant application of ethical norms is essential in every living
function; but one misconceives this duty if one holds that goodness
displaces every other kind of value: that for the sake of ‘‘being good’^
one may and should renounce love and marriage, art and science,
sport and play. Such desert island virtue is as meaningless as it is
easy.

The whole process of moral evaluation and choice and directed de-
velopment is justified in the long run only by the sort of life it facili-
tates and the sort of personality it produces: but in that process some-
thing more than mere goodness is achieved. To live only to be good is
to become goody-good. People whose life is confined to obeying the
prescribed rules for conduct tend to belittle the very purposes for
which ethics exists: that is, a life both more abundant and more sig-
nificant. Such people, smug, placid, untormented by strong impulses,
over-impressed by their own righteousness, too often lack any capac-
ity to grow: thus, in their blameless existence, they may negate the
very conditions that give meaning to moral evaluations and choices.

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For this reason, an adequate ethics must not only enable one to em-
brace in due measure the concrete goods that life offers, instead of
drawing back from them as wanton distractions: it must also find a
place for the dynamic role of evil: since the goods of life, by a curious
process of transmutation, often come forth from conditions that would
seem to oppose them.

Such an ethic will accept denial and sacrifice in order to make pos-
sible the fullness of giving: that is why it usually comes into existence
first, not among the prosperous and the satisfied, not in an “economy
of abundance,” but under conditions when men face death willingly
together. This simple fact was well put by an American soldier in com-
bat during the Second World War: “It’s hard,” he wrote, “for men
who live only because they co-operate, to explain things to people who
live only as semi-isolated individuals. A front-line soldier will almost
always give you half of his last dollar or one of his last two cigarettes.
An American civilian finds it hard to lend you half of his surplus.”
These men, facing death daily, knew that “you can’t take it with
you.” Only the understanding acceptance of man’s tragic destiny will
make possible that wider giving and taking of love which will lead
to man’s further development. The knowledge of this fact was the
essential strength of traditional Christianity: it is part of the ultimate
wisdom of an ethics of development and fulfillment.

3: THE CHALLENGE OF EVIL

In most historic definitions of the good there is a tendency to af-
firm as a conclusion the very question one has asked. The old Stoic
dictum, “Nothing but goodness is good,” is only a caricature of every
other definition: not excluding, of course, that which I have attempted
to give. For the good, as Thomas Aquinas observed and as Aristotle
taught before. him, is in one sense the very property of life itself: “The
good is being as an object of appetite.” Life itself is its own blessing
and when man appeared matter at last laughed. Taking life as the
very core of goodness, the Greeks before Socrates naturally rated
health as the supreme good of life, and after health, beauty. But this
youthful over-emphasis on bodily delight unfortunately is too inno-
cent to provide for all of life’s occasions. Are no goods left when
youth has disappeared and energy dwindled?

When one follows the full trajectory of life one must face the fact
that human beings, even before life reaches the downward curve, often

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face painful crises and suffer penalties: we may encounter crippling
accidents and fatal diseases, as well as consummations, gains, and
fulfillments. An optimistic ethics, which makes health and prosperity
the central, or even the supreme goods, becomes childishly bewildered
and helpless when overtaken by bodily disaster. By contrast, a pessi-
mistic ethics, deliberately embracing the bad in order to fend off
something worse, partly fortifies the spirit, as Mithridates did his
body, by taking a daily dose of poison. But by its own logic such an
ethic is forced to assert that love is a snare, that joys are worthless
because they vanish, and that prosperity is only a more subtle kind
of misfortune.

Now, no matter how bad life may prove, we need an ethics that
will do justice to its benign moments; and no matter how good it may
become, we must still reckon with life’s final undoing. With wise
teaching and provident laws and improved technics we may abolish
poverty, crime, and disease, or reduce them to minimal amounts, as
Robert Owen once preached: that hope is a wholly legitimate one. But
in some form, deviously if not directly, the forces of evil will still
beset life, if only because there is a widening discrepancy, as man ad-
vances upward in the scale of being, between his own purposes and
the lower order of nature.

These extraneous forces will threaten man’s plans sometimes with
the appearance of concentrated malice, such as enraged the soul of
Captain Ahab, sometimes with the drooling inconsequence of an idiot
giant whose fumbling hands may strangle a baby as easily as a mouse.
An earthquake, a bolt of lightning, a raging fire, a falling meteor, a
plague, a plane wreck, though they be events in an orderly and pur-
poseful world, nevertheless cut across the path of some living crea-
ture’s growth and development. From the standpoint of life, such
happenings are senseless and evil: yet this not-goodness that over-
powers goodness is closely bound up, at every stage, with man’s exist-
ence. One can recognize all these facts without, like the fashionable
existentialists, making a religion of that recognition. Evil, by its con-
stant threat, introduces an element of tragic struggle into a world that
would otherwise be in a state of effortless enjoyment, like some smiling
Polynesian island; but by the very fact that it rouses life to fuller
effort, it may be essential to human growth and renewal.

Are evil and good polar opposites, then, so intimately related that
one could not exist without the other? Or are they, as Augustine
thought, substance and shadow, so that evil is only the absence and

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dearth of the good; or are they each positive but not necessarily inter-
dependent aspects of life? Or finally, is there something ambiguous in
their character, which neither the doctrine of absolutism nor the doc-
trine of relativism sufficiently acknowledges? I put off this question for
later discussion in order to deal with still another doctrine widely
held today, that evil is merely a projection of fears and anxieties, and
that, by proper psychological therapy, it may be removed from the
mind and will therefore have no objective existence. This view was
put forward, with no little acumen, by Mary Baker Eddy, who with
psychosomatic insight even applied her philosophy to such bodily evils
as disease. Since then it has been taken over, on a materialistic rather
than a transcendental basis, by many psychiatrists, who would be some-
what embarrassed by this underlying association with Christian Science.

There is no doubt whatever that evils may have a subjective or
psychal origin: but this fact in no wise lessens their reality; nor does
it in the least prove that extirpation of a sense of guilt solves the
problem of evil in any case except a neurosis. Evils that are of human
origin require constant rectification; and the doctrine that “modern
man can do no wrong,” which so easily absolves him of all sense of
self-condemnation, has the effect of increasing the social burden of
evil by lifting responsibility from the shoulders of the evildoer. By
that fact, it removes the impulse to repentance and self-correction, both
essential for moral development.

Recently, an intelligent and earnest group of people in Texas re-
solved to come to grips with the cause of the domestic and interna-
tional tensions that are visible today: they formed a co-operative
group and enlisted aid from the outside, in their search for a method
which would banish the fear and anxiety which, following current
psychological fashion, they took to be the only source of positive evil.

The general premises of the Behavior Research Project can be
summed up, in their own words, as follows: “If we are to reduce
human fears in order to eliminate evil, we can no longer use the
devices of blame and reprisal in our social action in community life.
Blaming the other fellow (or ourselves) is further punishing Ae al-
ready insecure personality. This creates greater fear and generates
more ^eviT counteractions. . - . If the problem of evil is the problem
of fear, we must find the causes of fears, ease them, and thus triumph
over evil.” These premises are highly characteristic of the general
attitude toward evil in our civilization: one which reduces life to a
sequence of external causes and effects, and has no place for human

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159

reason and purpose; for, on these popular terms, reasons are merely
rationalizations that cover brute impulses, and in a non-purposeful
world, the means generate their own ends: "'the going is the goal”
The issues raised by this group were so general, that I will illustrate
my point further by giving with slight amplifications my own comments
on their inability to overcome their own inertia.

"The dilemma in which you find yourselves reveals, from my stand-
point, what was wrong in your original approach and what, I fear, will
vitiate your further work, unless you can bring yourselves to re-
examine your original assumptions.

"The unexamined premise is, as you must know, the chief source of
radical errors. Your unexamined premise is the belief, which seems
to you axiomatic and unquestionable, that evil has only one source,
fear, and therefore the simple, indeed the only way, to eliminate evil
is to reduce fear. This for you, following many latter-day psychiatrists,
means banishing any sense of guilt; and to do this effectively you
must nullify the tendency to blame other people or even to blame
oneself.

"T question this whole set of assumptions, including your notion that
any evil that does not derive from fear is "mystical,’ that is, unreal or
without objective foundation. You have closed your eyes to a large
body of evidence when you define fear and evil in such narrow terms:
you forget that both Greek and Christian culture, with a far longer
experience of life than modern psychiatry, have attributed the chief
source of sin, not to fear but to pride and self-love, which are only
exaggerations of the constructive virtues of dignity and self-respect.

"Now even fear has a proper function in the organism, if it is fear
of a real danger, not of an imaginary one; and similarly, blame has
an effective part in the human economy, if he who is blamed has in
fact committed a wrong action that greater conscientiousness or wake-
fulness might have avoided. In the extreme case you will of course ac-
knowledge this: you will admit that no amount of love and fellow-
feeling and psychological understanding should lead one to withhold
reproach from, say, a locomotive engineer who has fallen asleep on
the job and caused a wreck. Because all of us wish social approval
in some degree, blame becomes a means of re-enforcing the super-ego,
when it might flag in its supervision; or when, to protect himself from
undue pain, a person might seek to anesthetize his conscience. '

"An honest ethics, it seems to me, cannot attempt to lift the burden
of guilt from one who has sinned or committed a crime. What it will

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seek to do, rather, is to appraise the evil that has been done, sensi-
tively and understandingly ; it will discourage excessive neurotic re-
actions to the normal errors, and be lenient or merciful to the extent
that others have been implicated or must bear some of the burden of
the guilt. Thus if the engineer fell asleep because he had been over-
worked by his superiors, the latter would share a large portion of the
responsibility. But avoid fixing blame altogether? No. The truth is
that people in our culture have a morbid tendency to avoid blame,
because they do not wish to take the trouble to change their conduct
in any way: blame-avoidance and blame-transference are therefore
endemic amongst us. These are substitutes for repentance and renewal.

“In fine, the way to neutralize evil tendencies is not to deny the ob-
jective existence of evil or to avoid hating what is hateful and blaming
what is blameworthy, but to accept the fact that w^e have in our own
conduct the very tendencies we dislike and see so plainly in those who
oppose us; and without abating our legitimate responsibilities to cor-
rect acts in others that need correction, to call upon our fellows in
turn to help correct them in us. An ethics which seeks to promote
good without recognizing any evil but that derived from fear, and
which offers rewards without daring to inflict penalties, will prove a
much more formidable obstacle to human co-operation than the sys-
tems it seeks to replace.

“Let us grant that some fo^ms of evil must be treated as a remedi-
able disease, as Samuel Butler first satirically suggested in Erewhon.
But if all evils were of a purely neurotic origin, the psychotic’s gifts
for murder or torture would be indistinguishable from acts of love
since they leave him with no sense of guilt or remorse. That is the
reductio ad absurdum of your attempt to reduce evil to fear and to
banish all blame and guilt: ‘goodness,’ on those terms, would merely
be a name covering large areas of unacknowledged evil.”

4: THE SALT OF LIFE

In practice, evil offers a dramatic contrast to good and heightens its
quality, as vinegar or salt bring out the taste of food: the fact that
life turns out to be a dramatic struggle, rather than a pageant, is due
precisely to this constant clash of impulses and forces, within and
without. But let us not repeat the common mistake of an exclusively
dialectical analysis of this struggle: the value of the good is not posi-
tively increased by its negation. Food would be nourishing even if

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161

starvation never threatened one, and friendship would be rewarding
even if enemies did not exist. Theoretically, then, one may easily con-
ceive a world in which there would be only a choice of lesser or
greater goods.

The dream of such a world of innocence and plenty, health and joy,
has haunted man from the beginnings of his consciousness of pain and
evil; and one finds it expressed in all the great literatures: in Hesiod’s
picture of the Golden Age, in Chuang-Chou’s description of a similar
state, and of course in the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden.
Even now, this is the world that our more naive contemporaries be-
lieve we are on the point of establishing through the advances of med-
ical science, mass production, and an ‘"economy of abundance.” A
world in which every disease will be cured by magic drugs, every
pain effaced by anesthetics, a world where no inordinate desire will
exist that the industrial mechanism cannot gratify, since by sedulous
training human beings will be conditioned to express no desires that
cannot so be met.

So man might mature as the trees grow: self-contained, filling
out his shape, never experiencing disharmonies, never encountering
crises, wholly at one with himself and with his environment. William
Morris, in News from Nowhere, conceived such a two-dimensional wall-
paper world, without strong highlights and without depths; but he
was honest enough to admit that the possibility of murder would re-
main. Indeed, in a letter written in 1874, his insight into the nature
of evil in the human economy went even farther: “Years ago,” he
wrote, “men’s minds were full of art and the dignified shows of life,
and they had but little time for justice and peace; and the vengeance
on them was not increase of the violence they did not heed, but de-
struction of the art they heeded. So perhaps the gods are preparing
troubles and terrors for the world (or our small comer of it) again,
that it may once again become beautiful and dramatic withal.”

Even were the equable self-fulfillment of a Golden Age actually
achieved, it would in its very perfection bring about a new kind of
evil: it would arrest life and stultify it; for it would no longer pro-
duce the kind of disruption and conflict out of which higher forms of
life become possible. The fact is that temporary chaos, if it does not
harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more helpful to man’s devel-
opment than a regularity too easily accepted, a happiness and equilib-
rium too effortlessly achieved: it is not in the hothouse, under “ideal”
conditions, that one grows life’s most perfect fruit. If life is to escape

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the cycle of repetition and mere survival on a dull animal level, some
measure of disintegration, as Lloyd Morgan pointed out, is essential
to its higher emergence. The seed must be buried, the husk of the seed
must rot, the body must die to its old habits and constraints, if a higher
order of growth is to come forth.

In some sense pain and organic disharmony and psychological con-
flict, so far from being wholly deplorable accidents, are among the
requisites for development: for growth is a state of unbalance on
the way to a higher equilibrium. In this sense, crises are normal events
in growth. Childbirth, teething, the first coitus, not merely painfully
punctuate the successive phases of bodily maturity but have their
parallels in the spirit. Graham Wallas collected a long list of biogra-
phies of exceptionally gifted people, whose opportunity for a more
intense and fruitful development was furtliered by illnesses or dis-
abling accidents. Many of the experiences of life which one would
avoid as evil, or at very least as damnably unpleasant, if one had the
possibility of rejecting them, often turn out to be conditions for ade-
quate growth. That is why those who have been able to assimilate
their experiences in war usually have a far higher degree of maturity
than those who never faced extreme hardship and terrifying danger.
If one had life completely on one’s own terms and lived it solely ac-
cording to the pleasure principle, as people so often dream, it would
probably turn out to be as vapid and empty as the historic lives of the
ruling classes: lives so flavorless that the aristocracy, in their boredom,
must provide themselves danger and difficulty in the form of polo or
mountain climbing or duels of honor in order not to lose their appetites
entirely.

This does not mean, however, that good and evil are everywhere
quantitatively equal; or that they .are the right and the wrong sides of
the same coin, inseparable by nature. And it does not necessarily lead
to the conclusion, to which Dr Reinhold Niebuhr comes in his Interpre-
tation of Christian Ethics, that the possibilities of evil inevitably grow
with the possibilities of good, so that “human history is therefore not
so much a chronicle of the progressive victory of good over evil, of
cosmos over chaos, as the story of an ever-increasing cosmos, creating
ever-increasing possibilities of chaos.” These are, no doubt, theoretic
possibilities, and sometimes they have had historic existence: indeed,
they would fit very closely in a “diagnosis of our own time.” But there
is no ground for thinking that such possibilities are constant necessi-
ties. On the contrary, viewing life as a whole, one may say that within

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163

its realm order has been on the increase and the realm of the good has
widened. The complex symphonic order that life seeks is of a more
unstable kind than the order of the physical universe; and precisely
because it is so complex and so delicately balanced and timed, it car-
ries with it the constant possibility of retrogression and complete dis-
ruption. So far Niebuhr is right.

But many communities that have freed themselves from leprosy and
typhus have not merely decreased the quantity of evil from that par-
ticular source: they have at the same time lowered the general death
rate. If the processes of improvement were as self-negating as Nie-
buhr makes them out to be, even such a temporary gain could hardly
be expected. The whole case for ethical guidance, indeed, rests on the
fact that both relatively and absolutely the quantity of good can be in-
creased and the quantity of evil reduced. As I have said elsewhere,
evil, like arsenic, is a tonic in grains and a poison in ounces: hence
its decrease is a major goal of human effort. But all goods are perish-
able, and evils, like weeds, continue to spring up: so that every gen-
eration must continue its discriminations and persist in its efforts.

If there were not this difference in favor of the good, if, speaking
mythically, the devil were fully the equal of God, and not an inferior
power who schemes to overthrow his lord but never quite succeeds,
there would be hardly any sense in preferring good to evil, since any
gain in the first would only make the second more formidable. On
those terms, life would be doomed to inescapable frustration. But
that is like saying that the better a city is planned and built, the more
slums it will show, or the more law-abiding citizens there are in a
country the more criminals they will have to fight: propositions con-
trary to both reason and observed fact. (Thanks to good laws and
vigilant moral discipline, it was once possible for Daniel Webster in
all honesty to boast, so low was the rate of crime in mid-nineteenth
century Massachusetts, that no householder had to lock his door at
night.) Every assumption that the proportion of good and evil is un-
alterable must lead, as it has constantly led in Christian thought, to
a doctrine of quietism: a false creed which, incidentally, is fatal to
the pursuit of justice and the exercise of civic virtue.

Our second problem is whether moral principles are absolute or
relative. That is an ancient theme in ethics; but the modern displace-
ment of positive standards began in the eighteenth century with that
representative philosopher, Denis Diderot: in some ways the first and
the most admirable of the “moderns.” In his annotated edition of

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Shaftesbury he noted that ‘‘there is no moral principle, no rule of vir-
tue whatever,” that could not be contradicted by customs and condi-
tions in some other race or climate of the world. The observation was
true; but the implied conclusion was unsound.

This devaluation was founded on a romantic exaggeration of the
importance of the surviving primitives; and it failed to distinguish
between forms of life that are repetitive, stultifying, infantile, and the
forms produced by the higher civilizations which, for all their sins
and lapses, have tended toward development, maturation, emergence.
Civilized man has indeed much to learn from primitive peoples; but
those tribes ^and communities that differ most widely in moral values
from the universal standards of civilization have contributed few im-
portant values to the rest of mankind. Against many minor departures
from the common norm, which back up Diderot’s dictum, one must
place the much more significant fact that the majority of civilized peo-
ple for the last three thousand years — billions as compared to a few
poor millions — have lived by progressively universal principles, whose
similarities are far more significant than their differences.

Within the great circle of the historic civilizations the main direc-
tions of morality have been well set: to follow customs and frame laws
that regulate social relations, in order to make conduct predictable,
instead of wholly erratic and self-willed; to respect symbols and con-
serve values; to refrain from murder, violence, and theft; to respect
organized and sanctioned forms of sexual relationship; to nurture the
young and stand by them as long as they are helpless; to tell the truth
and to refrain from falsehood — ^though as to lies, violence, and thefts
the Greeks of the Homeric poems were still a little shaky. This basic
morality is in fact common to all human society: what distinguishes
civilization is a heightened consciousness of the occasions for moral
choice and a positive effort to extend the benefits of the moral code
outside the community where it. originated.

These, and many similar precepts and regulations, are deeply in-
grained in the human tradition; they remain operative as long as that
tradition is deliberately passed on from parent to child, from teacher
to student, from master to disciple or apprentice. Customs and choices
may, in minor respects, differ; but to have no customs and to make
no choices — on the ground that obvious historic and natural differ-
ences make them all meaningless — is to be demoralized. So, too, to
make any “original” departures from the common norm, such as

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165

Nietzsche made when he extolled torture, is to open the way for such
psychopathic conduct as Hitler and his followers practiced.

Plainly, some norms of conduct are better established than others:
some are still reserved for in-groups and denied to the out-groups. But
except in times of social disintegration (when they are widely rejected)
these norms help to establish an essential part of man’s humanness-
Now, none of mankind’s present “absolutes” in morals existed from
the beginning: man was not born, in his primitive state, with a special
moral sense that enabled him to distinguish at once these universal
principles. Each is the result of long-continued efforts, experiments,
appraisals: trials that must still go on. By now, however, certain ques-
tions, like cannibalism or incest, are no longer open ones. The fate of
the human race today depends largely upon our moral decision to
place torture, war, and genocide under the same inviolable rule. Rela-
tivism, by its indifference to the universal, by its insistence that all
goods are equally valuable expressions of local taste or ephemeral
impulse, actually places itself on the side of the tribal, the static, the
unprogressive: processes and states that obstruct human growth. Even
the most hidebound ethical system is still more favorable to life than
a relativism that denies the possibility of universal principles and
stable standards, or whose one form of obligation is conformity to
external change.

Good and evil nonetheless remain in an ambiguous relationship ; and
in interpreting their operation further we shall, incidentally, do jus-
tice to the element of truth in the relativist’s position.

5 : CHRONOMETRICAIS AND HOROLOGICALS

Perhaps the classic statement of this two-faced role of good and evil
is to be found in the novel, Pierre, by Herman Melville: a novel whose
sub-title, The Ambiguities, underlines the discoveries that Melville
himself made in the very course of writing it, and embodied in the
paper attributed to the Transcendental philosopher, Plotinus Plin-
limmon, a curious spiritual caricature of Hawthorne and Emerson.

The title of the paper, Chronometricals and Horologicals, points to
the relationship between the absolute and the relative. Here Melville
shows that in the modern world absolute time, as reckoned by the
planetary movements, is set by the observatory at Greenwich; and
every vessel setting out from London checks its ship’s chronometer by
Greenwich time. But by the time the ship reached, say, China, its cap-

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tain would discover a startling discrepancy between his own accurate
chronometer and the local clocks or sundials. If the captain tried to
conduct the day’s business by a schedule that kept to his own Green-
wich time, he would be sleeping by daylight and making sociable calls
when his Chinese neighbors were in bed.

So with the highest principles of conduct. Each generation, Melville
observes, produces a few rare souls who try to guide their lives by
heavenly time, and seek to make that absolute and universal: they are
ready to sell all that they have and give to the poor, or to turn their
right cheek when their left is slapped. But men in the mass live their
lives by local time; they desire to reach heaven before giving all they
have to the poor; although, as Melville ironically remarks, they will
find it easier to practice this virtue in heaven, since there are no poor
in that place. From the smug standpoint of the local time-observers,
it is heavenly time that is wrong.

All this brings out a fact that Niebuhr has skillfully, indeed bril-
liantly, developed: that our ideals, however imperative and absolute,
must nevertheless reckon with the fact that we live in the realm of the
historically conditioned, subject to pressures and environmental limi-
tations that cannot be entirely put aside. In other words, the^ moral
ideal is a compass point, not a destination: while a fixed orientation
to north and south is essential in order to find one’s way to port, one
may have to tack one’s ship, now to the east, now to the west, in order
to move in the general direction one has chosen; while if one sets one’s
course unconditionally to north or south, one will find oneself at last
only in a polar waste. One steers by the fixed North Star, not in order
to reach an ideal north, but in order to find a fair haven.

Pierre makes some of these discoveries for himself; but unfortu-
nately neither he nor Herman Melville drew the correct conclusions.
In his endeavor to confound the morality of prudence, exemplified by
Pierre’s worldly mother and her spiritual counselor, the Reverend Mr
Folsgrave, Pierre brings disorder and disaster into the lives of all
those around him: his “noble” unconditioned conduct, released from
all traditional guidance, penetrates the patched garments of conven-
tion like an X-ray, only to attack the living flesh beneath. His mother,
his new-found half-sister, his wife, and finally himself pay the penalty
for his proud intransigence. In pursuing the absolute, with his eyes
fixed only on the distant horizon, Pierre stumbles into deeper sloughs
than he would have encountered if he had never raised his eyes from

beyond moral ambiguities

167

the ground and attempted merely to leap over the mud-holes that
blocked his path, or pursued a circumspect course around them.

Wherein lay Pierre’s radical error? Mainly in the fact that he forgot
it is only at Greenwich — at an ideal point — ^that absolute and local
time coincide. Worse, he forgot that once the Astronomer Royal leaves
his observatory, he must keep time by an ordinary watch, an imperfect
instrument which gains or loses time or flatly stops and must be wound
up: such time will no longer coincide with astronomical observation,
if he moves east or west of the meridian line.

Melville may be right in saying that the saints are those who live
closest to this zero meridian; but that does not make them infallible
in their daily living, nor does it condemn as untrue to Greenwich time
the timekeepers that are followed in other lands, provided they have
made their own corrections with reference to astronomical time. In
other words, there is no abstract formula for virtue that yields an un-
conditioned result. What do Pierre’s unconditional idealism or his
sexual purity profit if they lead to frigidity and impotence, to hate and
anguish, to misery and suicide? Melville was as wrong-headed as
Pierre in his conclusions; and the black disaster that finally envelops
his hero and those whom he loves was the natural climax to his error:
repeated once more, in effect, in his personal life.

There is no virtue that may not, at any moment, turn into its oppo-
site. Humility, pursued too steadfastly, may give rise to pride over
its very achievement: Pierre’s absolute integrity produces disintegra-
tion. ‘‘The good in goodness often find an enemy to dread,” as an
ancient Hindu scripture observes. By the same token, there is no
vice so desperate, no impulse so depraved, that man may not out of
his depths, by reaction, create an otherwise unattainable good. This
explains Jesus’s preference for the sinner to the Pharisee: it was not
only that the sinner needed more urgently to be saved, but that, once
saved, he would perhaps be a better man than his more studiously vir-
tuous rival.

As essences, good and evil are poles apart: fixed poles. But in ex-
istence, they are the algebraic signs that indicate positive or negative
quantities; and they change values as the symbols of life shift from
one side of the equation to the other. Was not this the meaning of
Emerson’s Uriel: “Evil will bless and ice will burn”? These paradoxes
and ambiguities in the moral life are well illustrated by two contrast-
ing historic occasions: at Athens in the time of Demosthenes and in
England in the days of Churchill. The Athenians, unable to depart

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from their beloved way of life, doomed themselves to defeat; whereas
the moral readiness to face danger and death brought life to the British
and reversed a long series of disasters, occasioned by their earlier un-
willingness to encounter positive evil.

That change, as we know, brought compensations that other coun-
tries, which shrank collectively from making the same choice, did not
share. The high morale of Britain after the war, with its equable sys-
tem of rationing, ‘‘fair shares for all”; the resolute effort to cope with
economic difficulties through the exacting discipline of the austerity
program; the statesman-like surrender of its rule in India — all these
positive moral gains were made possible by the original decision to
accept death and destruction. As long as Britain sought safety and
peace, its very life was in danger: as soon as Britain dared to face in-
security and even extinction, it was saved. That algebraic shift is a
constant factor in the moral life: hence the need for unremitting
watchfulness.

If fullness of life fits the positive definition of the good, this pleni-
tude does not belong to life in its primeval innocence, overflowing with
fresh animal spirits and radiant health: it comes only with knowledge
of good and evil, with action on behalf of one and against the other.
Ambiguously, though evil itself must be combated, diminished, forced
into retreat, it enters the human situation as one of the conditions for
life’s highest fulfillment. Evil and good are both phases in the process
of growth and self-realization: who shall say which is the better
teacher? In other words, the very forces which, if triumphant, would
destroy life are needful to ripen experience and deepen understanding.

Those who aim at a particular good, are often carried to their des-
tination by the very path they consciously seek to avoid. In achieving
a life abundant, accordingly, success lies not in altogether escaping
evil, but in being able to turn the negative forces to the account of the
personality itself. For those unprepared to cope with evil, life’s in-
jurious moments count only as a dead loss. But once evil is accepted,
as an element as much in the run of vital processes as waste and
fatigue, the law of compensation may operate; and in energizing the
spirit evil may — as Helen Keller’s life reminds us — sometimes give
back more than it has taken.

The good, then, is that which furthers growth, integration, trans-
cendence, and renewal. Evil, by contrast, is that which brings about
disintegration and de-building, arrests growth, creates a permanent
unbalance, dissipates energy, degrades life, baffles and frustrates the

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169

spirit, and prevents the emergence of the divine. Not sin but indiffer-
ence, not erroneous knowledge, but skepticism, are the chief aids of
the destroyer.

The concepts of growth, emergence, and transcendence take us far
in the interpretation of human life: but they provide no terminus for
human effort; and in that sense, even if life went well at every stage,
they would leave each of us with a tantalizing sense of incompleteness
and non-fulfillment, an endless stirring and striving, without any goal
except a provisional one: a continued ascent of pinnacles that revealed
only further peaks to climb. But actually, at least in human life, a pro-
visional stopping place is provided, in the sense that one may have
momentary glimpses of the end of the journey and of all that one could
accomplish if one had endless days to command. The need for some
such finality undoubtedly has led to the conjuring up of eternal heavens:
mirages of unqualified beatitude, enjoyed forever; but there is a more
functional interpretation of this idea of heaven which places it, not in
a period after death, but in the midst of life itself.

Mary Boole remarked that ‘‘anything which seems to you worth do-
ing you will never be allowed to do long: ‘pour vous empecher de
routiner.^ ’’ This is true of all man’s most intense or highest experi-
ences: from the delight of a common orgasm with one’s beloved to
the joys of intellectual illumination. But it is in such moments that life
seems irradiated in every direction: moments detached from all prepar-
atory activity or further result, moments so intensely good in them-
selves, so complete, so all-satisfying that neither further emergence nor
transcendence seem needed, since they are present in the experience
itself. These are the moments when art seems poignantly to encompass
all of life’s possibilities, or, by the same token, when life reveals the
significances of art.

Without such consummations, without such precious moments, man
would be but the traditional donkey, flayed by a stick; behind, lured
by a deceptive carrot in front of him. To be alert to seize such moments
of high insight, unconditioned action, and perfect fulfillment is one
of the main lessons of life: endless activity, without this detachment
and contemplation and ultimate delight, cannot bring life’s fullest
satisfaction. What man creates in art and thought justifies itself, not
only by contributing to life’s development and the emergence of new
values, but by the production of significant moments. Those who have
encountered these moments, who have held them close, can never be
altogether cheated or frustrated, even by life’s worst misfortunes or

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by its untimely curtailment. An education or a general mode of life
that does not lead — ^though by indirection — to such moments and
heighten their savor, falls short of man’s needs.

6: REPENTANCE AND RE-AFFIRMATION

We are now prepared to understand the significance of the Jewish-
Christian insight into the nature of evil: in particular, its perception
of the fact that the assumptions that man is naturally good or that he
may, by trusting entirely to scientific thought and technical invention,
avoid any contamination of evil, are both illusions. Evil is as much
a part of human existence as entropy, or the running down of energy:
in one sense, it is the human counterpart of entropy and chance, break-
ing down organization, direction, and purpose. In this respect, Greek
philosophers, who took pride in their own goodness even when they
denied the certainty of truth or the usefulness of positive science, and
humanistic philosophers of the eighteenth century type, who believed
that man was born good and was corrupted only by external institu-
tions and wily authorities, both failed to take in the facts of existence.

Unfortunately, the illusion that man is naturally good and can at
will avoid evil is almost as much an obstacle to human development
as the philosophy that man is naturally bad and cannot, by any efforts
of his own, attain to the good: both of them leave human nature in a
static condition, incapable of achieving wisdom through trial and error
or reflective insight into its own actual nature. In a time of social
disintegration, both these interpretations of the dynamic interaction of
good and evil not merely share’ the field; they impede the necessary
transformation of personal conduct and social plans. For the fact that
evil is a constant element in life does not mean that one must submit
to it; but it means that, if one is to get the better of it, one must ac-
knowledge it, and above all, one must repent of it — repent in the literal
sense of changing one’s attitude and turning away.

As a protection against altering tlieir ways, modern people tend to
recoil from the very word sin: they will not admit, first of all, that
they are capable of sinning, and they regard a sense of guilt as an
unfortunate mental disturbance that should be removed, as promptly
as possible, by a psychoanalyst. These blameless people, in their
massive serenity and self-complacence, are probably a greater block
to the renewal of life today than the most brutal dictators, whose ne-
farious designs often awaken the very opposition and struggle that

BEYOND MORAL AMBIGUITIES

171

produce change. It was the blameless statesmen, too rational to enter-
tain a conviction of sin — ^the Blums, the Beneses, the Chamberlains —
who led their contemporaries into appeasement and surrender: it was
a good and upright man, an exemplary citizen, Henry L. Stimson, sure
that his own decisions were untainted by evil, who not merely sanc-
tioned the use of extermination bombing but even after there was time
for reflection continued to justify that infamous policy.

These blameless ones do not repent: in a mood of fervid self-
justification they continue their follies and magnify them. That rigid
sense of self-righteousness, with its inability to confess the evils it com-
mits and bring them to an end, is perhaps the chief mark of a dying
civilization. If it could admit the possibility that it was on the wrong
course, and that every extra effort only hastened the moment of de-
struction, it would be able to change its direction. Not wishing to be
other than they are, the blameless ones, in their self-love, cannot con-
ceive the real alternative: another self, cleansed of guilt and freed
from folly, capable of renewal.

This general sense of blamelessness has been abetted, in our time,
by the fact that our most extravagant sins, perhaps, are less sins of
violence than sins of inertia. There have perhaps never before been
such a large number of people in the world who live blameless lives:
people who work regularly at their jobs, support their families de-
cently, show a reasonable degree of kindness to those about them, en-
dure colorless days, and go to the grave at last without having done
active wrong to a single living creature, except the god within them-
selves. The very colorlessness of the existence of such people — ^like
the colorlessness of sea water in small quantities — conceals the col-
lective blackness of their conduct. For this kind of sin consists in the
withdrawal from more exacting opportunities, in a denial of one’s
higher capacities: in a slothfulness, an indifference, a complacence, a
passivity more fatal to life than more outrageous sins and crimes. The
passionate murderer may repent; the disloyal friend may regret his
faithlessness and fulfill his obligations of friendship: but the mean
sensual man, who has obeyed the rules and meticulously filled out all
the legal papers, may glory in what he is — and that is a deeper mis-
fortune; for it is in his name, and by his connivance, precisely because
he sees no need for changing his mind or rectifying his ways, that our
society slips from misfortune to crisis and from crisis to catastrophe.
No wonder that Dante consigned these blameless ones to the Inferno —

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172

those who were neither for nor against the good. The hell of our times
is in no small part of their making.

On this matter, Christian theology has perhaps shown a more pro-
found insight than any other religion or philosophy; and though the
essential doctrines relating to evil, sin, repentance, and renewal are
too often set aside in the Churches today on the ground that they affront
modern man, proud of his neutral, scientific, sinless world, these in-
sights constitute the living core of Christianity, which every fuller syn-
thesis must make use of. The fact is we must admit the constant possi-
bility of sin, at every stage of life, indeed at every moment: partiality,
narrowness of vision, self-seekingness, rigidity, miscalculation, stiff-
necked pride, involuntary involvement with evils that carry one along
in their surge, as an innocent man may be caught in the midst of a
homicidal mob — all these have us in their grip. In our civilization, the
very impersonal forces that preside over so much of our destiny im-
plicate each of us, almost automatically, in sinful acts. Whether we
are conscious of it or not, prisoners are mistreated, insane people are
neglected, poor people are allowed to starve, beastly weapons of geno-
cide are manufactured, and a thousand other evil acts are committed,
not without our connivance. We are involved in these sins and can cor-
rect them only if we confess our involvement and take upon ourselves
personally the burden of correcting them.

If the men who misguided France during the fatal decade that ended
with the surrender of France to Hitler could have had the courage pub-
licly to confess and repent, they might have brought back the general
capacity to think and act in a more heroic mold. If the men who mis-
guided America since 1945, giving away the fatal secret of the atomic
bomb by exploding it, full of misplaced confidence in atomic and bac-
terial weapons of genocide, failing to place our full force and author-
ity behind the United Nations, following the wholly negative policy
of ^‘containment” toward Soviet Russia, could have confessed their
sins, at any moment we might have made a new start, on a basis that
might have brought the world into measures of co-operation still im-
thinkable. Instead, they magnified the enormity of their military errors
and their moral guilt — ^their lack of even a self-preservative life-sense
— ^by commissioning the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb.

If resistance to such an inner transformation continues, our whole
civilization will harden further in the very mold that will paralyze
what benign forces remain and prevent us from escaping a worldwide
catastrophe. Only people strong enough to admit their constant tend-

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173

ency to err and sin will be capable of finding new paths: only those
who confess their sins will be re-activated sufficiently to attempt the
transformation that must now take place in every institution, in every
group, in every person.

But the negative side of this change is not enough; for no one can
really turn aside from evil unless he has some positive vision of the
good. Alongside repentance goes a process too often overlooked: the
re-affirmation of virtues and goods. No more than evil can goodness
be taken for granted. One cannot hold fast to any good and hope that
it will remain intact, like a buried treasure: the best tradition, the
happiest state, will dry up and disappear unless one constantly re-
views it, replenishes it, and re-affirms it. Nothing that we do by routine
and habit is safe from corruption. In order to keep old truths alive,
we must re-think them, every year and every generation, testing them
in the light of further experience, altering the very terms and words
with which we express them in order to be sure that our thought is
still active and dealing with realities. In order to keep good institu-
tions in operation, we must re-dedicate ourselves to them, correct the
errors time constantly discloses in their workings, even deliberately
break up regulations and conventions that are about to crystallize to
a point where they resist human intervention.

Without a poignant consciousness of the goods of life, in all their
freshness and intensity, without some daily glimpse of beauty, some
expression of tenderness, some stir of passion, some release in gaiety
and laughter, some quickening of rhythm and music, our very human-
ity is not safe. To summon up the courage to go through our daily tasks,
above all in a Time of Troubles, where no goals can be reached with-
out sacrifice, we must remind ourselves, by conscious daily dedication,
of the goods we desire and value. This dedication is perhaps the psy-
chological core of prayer; and every concrete expression of the good,
in a song or a symphony, a poem or a loving embrace, has some of the
quality of prayer. There is no creation, in the end, except in the mood
of love; and if we are impotent to love, the mere recounting of our sins
will leave ashes in our mouths and cinders in our eyes.

Indeed, in the process of making over our lives, so that a new pat-
tern, more favorable to growth and renewal, may be designed, we shall
not merely re-appraise but re-savor all life’s multifarious goods: mak-
ing the most of them, no longer snatching and filching them with a
sore conscience or a sense of personal inadequacy and positive shirk-
ing. For the final effect of repentance and affirmation is a fresh appe-

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174

tite for life, all the keener for the fastings, abstentions, renunciations
that must necessarily precede it. The pain of rebirth will turn, on de-
livery, into a shout of joy. The fellowship of those who have experi-
enced renewal will be written on their faces: in a good-humored pa-
tience, and tenderness, in an outer resolution tempered by an inner
mirth.

CHAPTER VIL

THE FULFILLMENT OF MAN

1: THE FALLACY OF SYSTEMS

Most ethical philosophies have sought to isolate and standardize the
goods of life, and to make one or another set of purposes supreme.
They have looked upon pleasure or social efficiency or duty, upon im-
perturbability or rationality or self-annihilation as the chief crown of
a disciplined and cultivated spirit. This effort to whittle down valuable
conduct to a single set of consistent principles and ideal ends does not
do justice to the nature of life, with its paradoxes, its complicated proc-
esses, its internal conflicts, its sometimes unresolvable dilemmas.

In order to reduce life to a single clear intellectually consistent pat-
tern, a system tends to neglect the varied factors that belong to life by
reason of its complex organic needs and its ever-developing purposes,
indeed, each historic ethical system, whether rational or utilitarian or
transcendental, blandly overlooks the aspects of life that are covered
by rival systems: and in practice each will accuse the other of incon-
sistency precisely at those imperative moments when common sense
happily intervenes to save the system from defeat. This accoun'is for
a general failure in every rigorously formulated system to meet all of
life’s diverse and contradictory occasions. Hedonism is of no use in
a shipwreck. There is a time to laugh and a time to weep, as The
Preacher reminds us; but the pessimists forget the first clause and the
optimists the second.

The fallacy of systems is a very general one; and we can follow its
ethical consequences best, perhaps, in education. The moral becomes
equally plain, whether we consider a fictional or an autobiographic ac-
count. One thinks, for example, of Sir Austin Feverel’s system in
Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Full of reasoned contempt
for the ordinary educational procedures of his culture, Sir Austin
contrives a watchful private system, designed to avoid current errors

and to produce a spirited, intellectually sound, thoroughly awakened,

175

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

finely disciplined young man. But the system-maker had not reckoned
upon the fact that a young man, so trained, might, as the very proof
of the education, fall in love with a young girl not duly accounted for
in the system and elope with her in marriage; and that when the sys-
tem intervenes in this marriage in order to carry out its own purposes,
it would bring on a far more harrowing tragedy than any purely con-
ventional mode of education, less confident of its high intentions, less
set on its special ends, would have produced.

Or take an even better case, none the worse for being real : the child-
hood of Mary Everest, that extraordinary woman who eventually be-
came the wife and helpmate of the great logician, George Boole. Mary’s
father was the devoted disciple of Hahnemann, the philosopher of
homeopathic medicine; and he applied Hahnemann’s principles, not
merely to illness but to the whole regimen of life. Following strictly
the master’s belief in cold baths and long walks before breakfast, the
system-bound father practiced upon his children a form of daily tor-
ture that drove Mary Everest into a state of blank unfeelingness and
irresponsiveness. She hated every item in the strict routine; and her
whole affectional and sentimental life as a young girl, in relation to
her parents, w'as warped by it. The resentment she felt against this in-
flexibility and this arbitrary disregard of natural disposition is indeed
still evident in the account she wrote at the end of a long life.

Believing blindly in the system, Mary Everest’s father never ob-
served what was happening to his beloved children in actual life: for
the sake of carrying through the doctrine, he blindly disregarded the
testimony of life and took no note of scores of indications in his chil-
dren’s conduct and health that should have warned him that he was
working ruin. Every intellectually awakened parent who applied one
or another of the rival systems in psychology and education that be-
came fashionable during the last thirty years can testify out of his
own experience, if he reflects upon it — or at least his children could
testify — ^to the fallacy of over-simplification that is involved in the
very conception and application of a system. Life cannot be reduced
to a system: the best wisdom, when so reduced to a single set of in-
sistent notes, becomes a cacophony: indeed, the more stubbornly one
adheres to a system, the more violence one does to life.

Actual historic institutions, fortunately, have been modified by anom-
alies, discrepancies, contradictions, compromises: the older they are,
the richer this organic compost. All these varied nutrients that remain
in the social soil are viewed with high scorn by the believer in sys-

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177

terns: like the advocates of old-fashioned chemical fertilizers, he has
no notion that what makes the soil usable and nourishing is precisely
the organic debris that remains. In most historic institutions, it is their
weakness that is their saving strength. Czarism, for example, as prac-
ticed in Russia during the nineteenth century, was a hideous form of
government: tyrannical, capricious, inwardly unified, severely repres-
sive of anything but its own orthodoxy. But, as Alexander Herzen
showed in his Memoirs, the system was made less intolerable by two
things that had no lawful or logical part in it: bribery and corruption
on one hand, which made it possible to get around regulations and to
soften punishments; and skepticism from within, on the other, which
made many of its officers incapable of carrying out with conviction and
therefore with rigor the tasks imposed. In contrast, one may note in
passing, the relative “purity” of the present Soviet Russian regime
serves to buttress its inhumanity.

This tendency toward laxity, corruption, disorder, is the only thing
that enables a system to escape self -asphyxiation: for a system is in
effect an attempt to make men breathe carbon dioxide or oxygen alone,
without the other components of air, with effects that are either tem-
porarily exhilarating or soporific, but in the end must be lethal; since
though each of these gases is necessary for life, the air that keeps men
alive is a mixture of various gases in due proportion. So it is not the
purity of the orthodox Christian doctrine that has kept the Eastern
and Western Churches alive and enabled them to flourish even in a
scientific age, but just the opposite: the non-systematic elements, seep-
ing in from other cultures and from contradictory experiences of life:
covert heresies that have given the Christian creed a vital buoyancy that
seemingly tighter bodies of doctrine have lacked.

The fallacy of exclusive systems has become particularly plain dur-
ing the last two centuries: never have their errors, in fact, proved more
vicious than in our own time.

Since the seventeenth century we have been living in an age of sys-
tem-makers, and what is even worse, system-appliers. The world has
been divided first of all into two general parties, the conservatives and
the radicals, or as Comte called them, the party of order and the party
of progress — as if both order and change, stability and variation, con-
tinuity and novelty, were not equally fundamental attributes of life.
People sought, conscientiously, to make their lives conform to a sys-
tem: a set of limited, partial, exclusive principles. They sought to live
by the romantic system or the utilitarian system, to be wholly idealist

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

or wholly practical. If they were rigorously capitalist, in America, they
glibly forgot that the free public education they supported was in fact
a communist institution; or if they believed in communism, like the
founders of the Oneida Community, they stubbornly sought to apply
their communism to sexual relations as well as industry.

In short, the system-mongers sought to align a whole community ac-
cording to some limiting principle, and to organize its entire life in
conformity to the system, as if such wholesale limitations could do
justice to the condition of man. Actually, by the middle of the nine-
teenth century, it had become plain that the most self-confident of the
systems, capitalism, which had originally come in as a healthy chal-
lenge to static privilege and feudal lethargy, would, if unmodified by
other social considerations, strangle life: maiming the young and inno-
cent who toiled fourteen hours a day in the new factories, and starving
adults wholesale, in obedience to the blind law of market competition,
working in a manic-depressive business cycle. As a pure system, capi-
talism was humanly intolerable ; what has happily saved it from violent
overthrow has been the absorption of the heresies of socialism — pub-
lic enterprises and social security — ^that have given it increasing bal-
ance and stability.

Now a system, being a conceptual tool, has a certain pragmatic use-
fulness: for the formulation of a system leads to intellectual clarifica-
tion and therefore to a certain clean vigor of decision and action. The
pre-scientific age of abstraction, as Comte originally characterized it,
was a general period of un-knotting and disentanglement: the numer-
ous threads that formed the warp and woof of the whole social fabric
were then isolated and disengaged. When the red threads were united
in one skein, the green in another, the blue and purple in still others,
their true individual texture and color stood out more clearly than
when they were woven together in their original complex historic pat-
tern. In analytic thinking one follows the thread and disregards the
total pattern; and the effect of system-making in life was to destroy an
appreciation of its complexities and any sense of its overall pattern.

Such a sorting out of systems, with its corresponding division into
parties, made it somewhat easier, no doubt, to introduce new threads
of still different tones or colors on the social loom: it also encouraged
the illusion that a satisfactory social fabric could be woven together of
a single color and fiber. Unfortunately, the effort to organize a whole
community, or indeed any set of living relations, on the basis of mak-
ing every sector of life wholly red, wholly blue, or wholly green com-

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179

mits in fact a radical error. A community where everyone lived ac-
cording to the romantic philosophy, for example, would have no stabil-
ity, no continuity, no way of economically doing a thousand things that
must be repeated every day of its life: left to spontaneous impulse,
many important functions would not be performed at all. By whose
spontaneous desires would garbage be collected or dishes washed?
Necessity, social compulsion, solidarity play a part in real life that
romanticism and anarchism take no account of.

Similarly, a community that lived on the radical principle, divorc-
ing itself from its past and being wholly concerned with the future
would leave out as much of the richness of historic existence as John
Stuart Mill’s father left out of his education: by cutting off memory,
it would even undermine hope. So, too, a thoroughly Marxian com-
munity, where no one had any life except that provided by the State
on terms laid down by the State would do away with the possibility
of creating autonomous and balanced human beings: thus it would
forfeit — as Soviet Russia has in fact forfeited — the generous core of
all of Marx’s own most noble dreams.

In short, to take a single guiding idea, like individualism or collec-
tivism, stoicism or hedonism, aristocracy or democracy, and attempt
to follow this thread through all of life’s occasions, is to miss the sig-
nificance of the thread itself, whose function is to add to the complexity
and interest of life’s total pattern. Today the fallacy of “either-or”
dogs us everywhere: whereas it is in the nature of life to embrace and
surmount all its contradictions, not by shearing them away, but by
weaving them into a more inclusive unity. No organism, no society,
no personality, can be reduced to a system or be effectually governed
by a system. Inner direction or outer direction, detachment or con-
formity, should never become so exclusive that in practice they make
a shift from one to the other impossible.

None of the existing categories of philosophy, none of the present
procedures of science or religion, none of the popular doctrines of
social action, covers the method and outlook presented here. Not per-
sonalism, not humanism, not materialism, not idealism, not existential-
ism, not naturalism, not Marxian communism, not Emersonian individ-
ualism can comprehend the total view that, in the name of life, I have
been setting forward in these pages. For the essence of the present
philosophy is that many elements necessarily rejected by any single
system are essential to develop life’s highest creative potential; and

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that by turns one system or another must be invoked, temporarily, to
do justice to life’s endlessly varied needs and occasions.

Those who understand the nature of life itself will not, like Engels
or Dewey or Whyte, see reality in terms of change alone and dismiss
the fixed and the static as otiose; neither will they, like many Greek
and Hindu philosophers, regard flux and movement and time as unreal
or illusory and seek truth only in the unchangeable. Coming to the
practical affairs of life, this philosophy of the whole does not over-
value any single system of property or production: just as Aristotle
and the framers of the American constitution wisely favored a mixed
system of government, so they will favor a mixed economy, not afraid
to invoke socialist measures when free enterprise leads to injustice
or economic depression, or to favor competition and personal initiative
when private monopolies or governmental organizations bog down in
torpid security and inflexible bureaucratic routine. This is the philoso-
phy of the open synthesis; and to make sure that it remains open I
shall resist the temptation to give it a name. Those who think and act
in its spirit may be identified, perhaps, by the absence of labels.

The skepticism of systems is a basic thesis of this book; but it has
another name: the affirmation of organic life. If no single principle
will produce a harmonious and well-balanced existence, for either the
person or the community, then harmony and balance perhaps demand
a degree of inclusiveness and completeness sufiicient to nourish every
kind of nature, to create the fullest variety in unity, to do justice to
every occasion. That harmony must include and resolve discords: it
must have a place for heresy as well as conformity: for rebellion as
well as adjustment — and vice-versa. And that balance must maintain
itself against sudden thrusts and impulsions: like the living organism,
it must have reserves at its command, capable of being swiftly mo-
bilized, wherever needed to maintain a dynamic equilibrium.

2: THE REASON FOR BALANCE

Modem man, committed to the ideology of the machine, has suc-
ceeded in creating a lopsided world, which favors certain aspects of
the personality that were long suppressed, but which equally suppresses
whatever does not fit into its predominantly mechanical mold. Every
effort to overcome the strains and distortions that have been set up in
society by the general process of moral devaluation that has taken place

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181

during the last century, must have as its goal the restoration of the
complete human personality.

All life rests essentially on the reconciliation of two opposite states,
stability and change, security and adventure, necessity and freedom;
for without regularity and continuity there would not be enough con-
stancy in any process to enable one to recognize change itself, still
less to identify it as good or bad, as life-promoting or life-destroying.
The fixed structure of determined events — as Melville beautifully put
it in the mat-weaving chapter in Moby-Dick — is the warp on which
the shuttle of free will weaves the threads of different colors and thick-
nesses which form the texture and pattern of life. Internal stability
even of temperature, independent of a wide range of changes in the
outside world, is a mark of the higher vertebrates; and since man, at
the head of this vertebrate mammalian stock, has the widest range of
responses of any organism, he likewise needs extra mechanisms, which
he develops in mind and culture, for creating within himself the equi-
librium that is essential for both survival and growth. To achieve bal-
ance without retarding growth, and to promote growth without perma-
nently upsetting balance, are the two great aims of organic education.

Without balance there is defect of life; and if any proof were
needed of that miscarriage, the increase of neuroses in our civiliza-
tion, even apart from the number of people so ill that they are ad-
mitted to hospitals and asylums for the mentally unbalanced, would
almost be sufficient. We have created an industrial order geared to
automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary
for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis
is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other
end. More and more, our life has been governed by specialists, who
know too little of what lies outside their province to be able to know
enough about what takes place within it: unbalanced men who have
made a madness out of their method. Our life, like medicine itself,
has suffered from the dethronement of the general practitioner, capable
of vigilant ^election, evaluation, and action with reference to the health
of the organism or the community as a whole. Is it not high time that
we asked ourselves what constitutes a full human being, and through
what modifications in our plan of life we can create him?

Now, the notion of balance has something of the simplicity and natu-
ralness of the conception of the human body as most admirable and
beautiful in its nakedness, which the ancient Greeks arrived at and
made visible in their sculpture. Seemingly, that naked beauty was

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present from the beginning. But when we observe other cultures we
see that the naked body in all its simplicity, developed in every part,
undeformed and undisguised, is in fact a positive achievement. No
small human effort, before and after the Greeks, has been spent on
concealing the human body, on decorating it with garments, on mu-
tilating it or scarifying it, on painting it or fantastically tattooing it,
on altering the natural shape of the head, like tlie Peruvians, binding
women’s feet, like the Chinese, on carving the face or on creating fan-
tastic ducklike lips, like the Ubangi, on covering the head with a wig
like the Egyptians or the eighteenth century Europeans, on exagger-
ating the nose or the ears or the buttocks.

In fine, the Greek notion of letting the body arrive at its full growth,
without distortion and without concealment, finding beauty in its vis-
ible harmony and inner rightness, was a revolutionary conception.
To delight in the human body without shame, to enjoy it without adul-
teration, is no simple human prerogative: it comes only at the summit
of a high culture.

So with the notion of organic balance: both in the community and
in the person. In the long history of civilizations the balanced per-
sonality, even as an ideal, stands forth as a similar rarity. Perhaps
the reason for this rarity springs out of the peculiar nature of civiliza-
tion: the fact that in origin it was based on the division of labor and
on compulsory work: two measures that increased efficiency in pro-
duction and multiplied the power of tlie ruling classes, at a general
sacrifice of life: so that almost every people looked back to an earlier
period of balance on a more primitive level as their veritable Golden
Age. The conception of the balanced person, the Whole Man, first was
put forth, perhaps, by the Chinese: in the person and teachings of
Confucius, they beheld such an image and were profoundly affected
by it.

But it was the Greeks of the fifth century who arrived at the fullest
expression of the balanced person: first in life and then in reflection.
Witness the living example of such a man as Sophocles, handsome in
body and great of soul, capable of leading an army and writing a
tragic drama, ready to move through every dimension of human ex-
perience, keeping every part of his life in interaction — ^here was the
balanced person in its fullest development; and the culture of Athens,
which produced such a man, also brought forth within two centuries
a greater number of such men than history has shown anywhere else.

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183

That balance and that fullness of life were not long maintained.
As Plato recognized in The Republic, even Athens at her best had never
found a place for half the human race, its women, in its plan of life:
the inner conflict between romantic homosexual love and domestic
heterosexual love produced a fissure that weakened this whole so-
ciety. All the attempts to renew this society from Plato and Epicurus
to Paul, from the early mystery religions to Christianity, sought to
give woman a role the fifth century Athenians had denied her; but by
the time this was achieved, the conditions that had been so favorable
to the balanced personality in the fifth century had been undermined:
a Time of Trouble is, almost by definition, a time of imbalance and
distortion.

But there was likewise a good reason for rejecting the classic doc-
trine of balance in its original form; and this is that the early formu-
lation of it was a static one. From our insight into process throughout
the universe, above all from our knowledge of the living body, we
know that the stability we seek is not that of a closed system, which
has achieved a fixed and final shape, like the stability of a crystal,
and might remain the same for ten thousand years. All living creatures
are open systems, constantly seizing energy, converting it into “work’’
and dissipating it and then replenishing it over again: so that the only
form of balance that is truly conceivable or desirable in the human
organism is a dynamic balance: that of the fountain, endlessly chang-
ing, though within the pattern of change retaining its form. Even the
figure of the fountain is inadequate to describe organic forms, for
dynamic balance itself undergoes shifts and changes through the cumu-
lative effects of memory and through the further effects of time and
fresh events and new purposes on maturation and growth.

As with walking, one achieves balance in life only by a series of
lunges, which are in turn compensated by other lunges: to arrest that
movement, in the interest of equilibrium, would be to paralyze the
possibility of growth: the very condition that the equilibrium itself,
in living organisms, exists to further. The events tlmt most upset the
balance of the personality in actual life, illness, misfortune, error, sin,
grief — events that would deface any system of static perfection, as a
blow with a^ hammer would deface a marble statue — ^have the effect
of furthering spiritual growth and transcendence far more positively
than any condition of effortless ease and freedom from sin would
produce. The hot house fruits of life, the product of the “best possible
conditions,” have perhaps a waxen beauty and freedom from surface

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imperfection that fruits grown in the open, susceptible to wind and
weather, to worm and blight, do not possess: but the latter have the
finer flavor, and, at least in the personality, the most interesting and
significant marks of growth.

The classic notion of balance allowed no place for the negative mo-
ments of life: it dreamed of a timeless perfection that made no use of
time itself, nor of the process of maturation, nor of trial and error,
nor of sin and repentance: that is to say, it denied the processes of
growth, which upset the possibility of static perfection in the act of
enlarging the domains of beauty and significance. In this respect, the
Christian understanding of the radical imperfection of life provided
a better interpretation of man’s essential biological as well as his per-
sonal nature than the classic One. Balance is valuable as an aid to
growth: it is not the goal of growth.

But the ideal of balance is too central ever to disappear completely.
In partial form it reappeared in the Benedictine monastery, with its
life devoted to work, study, and prayer: a life whose concern for the
manual arts rectified the bias of earlier leisure-class schemes. In the
Renascence, partly under the influence of Platonic ideas, the ideal
came forth again in the dual conceptions of the gentleman and the
artist. In both these personalities there was an effort to do justice to
the whole man: the warrior, the priest, the philosopher, the athlete,
the manual worker, were united, in non-specialized forms, in a single
human organism: the gentleman. Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel-
angelo, were equally developed on the side of thought, feeling, emo-
tion, and action: the painting of the Sistine Chapel was not merely a
work of imagination, hut a gymnastic feat that demanded hardihood
and daring. Among the aristocracy, during the Renascence, women
played a fuller part than they had done in Greece: and therefore the
social balance was more effective. But neither slavery as practiced in
Greece, nor the combination of feudalism and early capitalism that
prevailed in Western Europe during the fifteenth century made it
possible to exten^ the ideal of balance to every member of the com-
munity: so at the very moment that balance and unity became visible
in the great personalities of this period, a paralyzing specialization
and subdivision of labor made its way into the community at large:
robbing the manual worker of such autonomy and balance as even the
peasant once had at a low level in his daily life. Still, the ideal of
the gentleman, fully cultivated in every aptitude of mind and body,
lingered on into the nineteenth century: there was some of the Renas-

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185

cence facility and roundedness in men like Goethe and Jefferson; and
this was incarnated, in more democratic form, in a Thoreau, a Melville
and a Whitman, with their capacity as gardener, surveyor, woodsman,
farmer, printer, carpenter, sailor, as well as writer.

The growth of a mechanistic culture, during the last three centuries^
has confirmed the older habits of caste division and specialization, by
narrowing the province of the individual worker, by multiplying and
refining the particular forms of specialization, by lessening the per-
sonal significance of his task. Those who still sought for some sort of
wholeness, balance, and autonomy were driven to the outskirts of
Western society: the pioneer alone preserved the qualities of the all-
round man, though he was forced to sacrifice many of the goods of a
rich historic tradition to achieve this. In general, the notion of the
segmentation of labor was carried from the factory to every other
human province.

In accepting this partition of functions and this over-emphasis of
a single narrow skill, men were content, not merely to become frag-
ments of men, but to become fragments of fragments: the physician
ceased to deal with the body as a whole and looked after a single organ,
indeed, even in Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes’s time, he remarked on spe-
cialists in diseases of the right leg, who would not treat those of the
left. In similar fashion, each man tended to nourish in himself, not
what made him a full man, but what made him distinguishable from
other men: mental tattooing and moral scarification were supposed to
have both high decorative value and immense practical efficiency. Such
people cheerfully bartered the fullest possibilities of life in order to
magnify their power to think, to invent, to command.

As a result, the apparently simple notion of the balanced person,
like the notion of the naked body, symmetrically grown and harmoni-
ously developed, without the over-emphasis or distortion of any organ,
a person, not rigid and hard-shelled, but supple and capable of mak-
ing the fullest response to novel situations, unexpected demands,
emergent opportunities, almost dtt)pped out of existence: repressed in
life, rejected in thought. Even groups and classes that had once es-
poused the aristocratic ideal of living a full and rounded life, shame-
facedly dropped their traditional aspirations and made themselves
over into specialists, those people Nietzsche pregnantly called inverted
cripples^ handicapped not because they have lost a single organ, but
because they have over-magnified it. Upon the ancient Babel of tongues
was erected a new Babel of functions; and the human community

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tended to turn into a secret society, in which no person was sufficiently
developed as a man to be able to guess what the other person, equally
undeveloped as a man, was thinking and feeling and premeditating.
Naturally this is an exaggeration: yet it hardly does justice to the loss
of the facilities for communication and communion that has taken
place. Only men who are themselves whole can understand the needs
and desires and ideals of other men.

Historically speaking, the periods of highest vitality, fifth century
Athens, thirteenth century Florence, sixteenth century London, early
nineteenth century Concord, are those in which most men have been
whole, and in which society has found the means of supporting and
furthering their wholeness. In such cultures, organs and capacities
and potentialities have been so generally developed that each person
could, as it were, change places with any other person and still carry
on his life and work: a general life-efficiency more than compensated
for the special facilities derived from narrow concentration. I see no
reason to think that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare; but hu-
man potentialities were so evenly developed during this period that
the hypothesis is not altogether absurd: not more absurd than to sup-
pose that Shakespeare might have written The New Atlantis or The Ad-
vancement of Learning, In those periods of balance and completeness
— and completeness is an essential attribute of the balanced person —
Hegel’s definition of an educated man still magnificently held: ^^He
who is capable of doing anything any other man can do.”

This view of human development contradicts the central dogma of
modem civilization: that specialism is here to “stay.” Rather, to the
very extent that the perversions of specialism are accepted as inevi-
table, the civilization that clings to them is doomed. Our deepening
insight into the needs of organisms, societies, and personalities sup-
ports just the opposite conclusion: specialism is hostile to life, for it is
the non-specialized organisms that are in the line of growth; and only
by overcoming the tendency to specialization can the community or
the person combat the rigidity which leads to inefficiency and a gen-
eral failure to meet life’s fresh demands. Let our over-specialized
sluggards consider the ant: in sixty million years formic society has
undergone no change and the experience of the ants has led to no
further development, precisely because of the miracle of adaptive spe-
cialization that brought perfection and stability at the ant’s level and
closed every route to change and betterment.

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187

The central effort in the renewal of life today must be to bring back
the possibility of wholeness and balance, not indeed as goods in them-
selves, but as the conditions for renewal and grov.1;h and self-transcend-
ence. We must break down the segregation of functions and activities,
both within the personality and within the community as a whole: hence
moral evaluations and decisions must not be intermittent acts, but con-
stant ones, whose main purpose is to maintain the balance that is partly
achieved and assist in those further developments, which, by upsetting
balance, lead to growth and increasing fulhiess of life.

To this end, our sterile mechanistic culture must be exposed to an
even more thorough drenching of the emotions than the earlier romanti-
cists dared to dream of. Without re-establishing the capacity for strong
expression, for erotic passion and love, for emotional exuberance and
delight, we shall also be unable to establish the inhibitions and con-
trols needed to escape automatism and to further autonomous activity;
for inhibitions, imposed on life that is already tamped down and de-
nied, are almost a sentence of death. Only those who have said Yes to
life will have the courage to say No when the occasion demands it.
Those who are starved will say Yes even to garbage — the current offal
of the popular press, radio, television — because they have not yet
tasted food.

Now the notion of balance in tlie personality is itself a many-sided
one. Theoretically it derives primarily from a close study of organ-
isms — internally, by physiologists, externally and socially by ecolo-
gists. Claude Bernard was the first to establish scientifically that a
dynamic equilibrium in the internal environment was essential for the
exercise of man’s higher functions: he also proved that very small
quantitative chemical changes could upset this balance and impair the
higher functions. But the more thoroughly one studies both organisms
and groups of organisms, the wider becomes the application of these
leading ideas: in the diet, for example, even faint traces of copper or
iodine may be essential to the proper functioning of the whole. Bal-
ance in other words is both quantitative and qualitative; and this gen-
eral condition for effective life applies to every human activity. Balance
in time, which is equally important, is established not by repetition
but by rhythmic alternation, as of day and night, exertion and rest,
expression and inhibition: small variations in rhythm may here prove
to be as important for the full functioning of the organism as the pres-
ence of tracer elements in the diet; and a routine of work which ig-

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nores the need for rhythms and change may lead to frustration, impair-
ment of function, and productive inefficiency.

I purpose presently to carry further the idea of balance: between
the external and the internal, between the individual and the group,
between autonomous functions and collective ones, between the transi-
tory and' the enduring: finally, between the local and tribal on one
hand, and the cosmopolitan and universal on the other. By our sys-
tematic scientific insight into balance today, we can carry the whole
process much farther than was possible through the earlier Greek or
Renascence intuitions. But here I would emphasize one special aspect
of balance that has a profound bearing upon the good life, all the
more because it is an aspect that has, in our generation, been gener-
ally ignored: the balance that must be maintained between the expres-
sive, life-asserting moments and the negative, inhibitive, nay-saying
moments.

In reaction against the forbidding rigidity of feudalism, modern
man sought to remove all boundaries and throw off all restraints.
Blake’s dictum, Damn braces, bless relaxes, might have served as
practical guide. Such freedom was mainly escapist: freedom from
arbitrary coercion, from stagnant duties, from outworn obligations.
But “freedom from,” even when amply justified, must be attached to
a positive ideal of “freedom for”: and this by its nature involves a
new restraint — fixation on a self-imposed goal. The freedom of the
spoiled child, who has everything he might wish for and lacks only
the power to wish or the patience to see his wish through, is the worst
of slaveries. Freedom in love, for example, demands an inner readiness
to be in love, freedom for commitment and continuity, not just for
new erotic adventures. The Casanova who flits from lover to lover
loses by that inconstancy one of the qualities of mature love: the totality
of its attachment, the need, despite fluctuations of passion, for a long-
continued union. There is no freedom in wandering unless one is
equally free to stay home. So in other phases of life, inhibitions are
as essential to freedom as to balance. Relaxes and braces, expressions
and inhibitions, in a rhythmic interplay. That is a prime secret of
balance.

Here I cannot improve on the observations of that wise woman,
Mary Everest Boole, when she said: “The ordinary man thinks of
physical temperance as a process of sacrificing the lower pleasures
to the higher; he does not understand that the rhythm of temperance
should be kept especially in what he calls the highest. The true prophet,

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189

on the contrary, knows tliat nothing is good except in rhythmic alterna-
tion. He is no more a glutton intellectually than physically; he no
more desires the constant enjoyment of what is called realizing the
Presence of God than he craves for unlimited brandy; he no more
aspires to a heaven of constant rapture in the intercourse of Jesus and
the Saints than to a Valhalla of everlasting mead-drinking in tlie com-
pany of ever lovely Valkyries. He desires, for every fibre of his body,
and every convolution of his brain, and for all the faculties he may
hereafter acquire that each may be the medium of an occasional rev-
elation. . . . He no more desires for his children incessant health or
prosperity than he desires for his vines a uniform temperature.”

Actually, the imbalance between the organism and the environment,
or more specifically, between the personality and the community, be-
comes increasingly fatal as we do one of two things: multiply the
stimuli and pressures that come from without, or decrease the number
of impulses and controls that originate from withiii. To achieve bal-
ance requires quantitative control on both sides; and the 'greater the
means at our command, the greater becomes the need for continence,
for discipline, for continued selectivity. Very definitely, therefore, the
notion of quantitative restriction enters into the conception of even
physiological balance, as it does with no less insistence into any scheme
of positive morality: constancy and continence: the reduction of the
maximum possible to the optimum assimilable. As we enlarge the
sphere of interest and the field of operations, we automatically in-
crease the number of shocks and stimuli that may throw the personal-
ity out of balance; and therefore we must counteract this tendency by
building up protective inhibitory reactions, by lengthening the circuits
of emotional response, and by slowing down the whole tempo of life.

But note: the ideal of balance must be applied in society before it
can be fully ejffective in the life of the person. No amount of watchful
self-discipline can create the necessary conditions for achieving equi-
librium and growth within the life of the single individual or tlie iso-
lated group: that is the fallacy of all fugitive and cloistered virtue.
Even the Stoic boast, ‘‘Nothing can hurt me,” was a piece of self-de-
ception. Every system of moral or religious discipline that puts the
whole weight of change upon the isolated individual does so by mini-
mizing the actual influences and pressures that are at work in his life,
and by voiding a large* part of their significance. Profound transfor-
mations may and do take place first in the individual person: but they

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

must come speedily to an end unless the condition for a more stable
equilibrium is maintained by widening the social base.

The static balance of a life focused completely within itself and
lived to itself, the balance of the self-absorbed and self-enclosed mys-
tic or yogin is, in a sense, too easy to achieve; it is like walking firmly
on a board laid on the ground: whereas the dynamic balance needed
for spiritual growth is like that called into play by crossing a chasm
on a single plank. The risk and the achievement of it are due to the
constant operation of forces, within and without: the walker’s giddy
imaginative projection into space, his latent tendencies to suicide,
weaknesses in the plank, the pull of gravity, the presence of anotlier
person treading on his heels, all give meaning to a process that would
otherwise lack both tension and exhilaration. If a hermit’s life is not
more empty than it is, it is because he has internalized so many of the
pressures of society: in fantasy he is still a social creature, tempted
by lusts that do not have to have outward existence to be effective.

While the person, then, is an emergent from society, it is within so-
ciety that he lives and functions; and it is for the purpose of sharing
values and meanings with other persons that the moral life becomes
something more than a lonely tight-rope walk in a private theater. Not
merely are we, in the strict Pauline sense, members one of another;
but balance and purpose require for their sustenance a community
whose activities and institutions work to the same end. . . , Without
that constant support, without that interplay between the person and
the group, only a meager and half-awakened life is possible. It is partly
in other men’s eyes that one sees one’s true image; it is partly
through other men’s example and support that one fathoms one’s own
potentialities; and it is toward a purpose that we share increasingly,
not merely with our immediate fellows, but with all mankind and with
generations still unborn, that we rise as men to our utmost height.

Many thinkers of the nineteenth century, even before specialization
had been carried to its present pitch, were quick to recognize these
facts, as I pointed out in The Condition of Man: this indeed is the one
common element that brings together thinkers as diverse as Spencer
and Marx and Kropotkin, artists as varied as Nietzsche and Ruskin
and Walt Whitman and William Morris, Though the ideal of the bal-
anced man has been less often stated during the last half-century, one
can find it, once more, in the work of later thinkers, as individualized
in their philosophies as Patrick Geddes and Havelock Ellis and A. N.
WTiitehead and Karl Mannheim, to mention only the dead. In the

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191

United States, the ideal of the balanced personality has been put forth
by Professor F. S. C. Northrop, in his attempt to unify the ideas of the
East and the West; and no less significantly, it has been restated, as
an essential condition for overcoming the corrosions and devastations
of our age, by such a rigorous psychologist as Edward Tolman, in his
essay on Drives Toward War.

After discussing the governing personality-images of Western cul-
ture in the past — ^tlie Spiritual Man of tlie Middle Ages, the Intellect-
ual Man of the Enlightenment, the Economic Man of the Victorian
period, Tolman goes on to say: ^^The underlying thesis of the present
essay will be that still a fifth myth (or, if you will, a fifth ideology)
is now nearly ready to appear, and that it must be made to appear. I
shall call it the myth of the Psychologically-adjusted Man. It will be
the myth, the concept, that only when man’s total psychology is under-
stood and all his absolutely necessary psychological needs are allowed
balanced satisfaction, will a society permitting relatively universal
happiness and welfare be achieved and war be abolished. It is the
m;^ (or rather, I dare hope, the ultimately true concept) that man
is, societally speaking, not a spiritual, intellectual, economic, or heroic
being, but rather an integrated complex, the entirety of whose psycho-
logical nature must be understood if general happiness and welfare
are to result.”

The chief changes my own analysis would lead me to make in Tol-
man’s statement would be to add that it is not merely necessary to
understand man’s complex wholeness, but as a further act of under-
standing, to create the positive channels through which it can be ex-
pressed. One of the road-blocks that halt this achievement is that we
cannot achieve wholeness, either intellectual or personal, merely by
uniting in their present specialized forms the existing body of men
and institutions. Such an encyclopedic massing of specialisms — ^which
H. G. Wells tirelessly advocated — will not produce synthesis in
thought, any more than an assemblage of specialized functionaries
within a community will produce a whole and balanced society. Such
mechanical cohesion, whether promoted arbitrarily by the state or
through more private initiative, can only produce a state of arrest:
not to be confused with the state of dynamic integration. Hard though
it may be for our age to accept the fact, we cannot become fully alive
again without being prepared to sacrifice the over-development of any
particular valued, function, and being ready to subordinate it to the
dynamic good of the whole. This will mean, in almost every activity.

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192

a decrease in productiveness: happily that decrease will be offset, in
the end, by an increasing fullness of life. Faced with the life of the
ordinary machine-worker, for example, we must be ready, if neces-
sary, to dismantle the assembly line in order to re-assemble the human
personality. In the interest of creating better citizens, better lovers
and fathers, better men, we may have to lower the number of motor
cars or refrigerators produced by the factory: balancing that loss by
the higher output of men.

This same rule will apply to almost every specialized facility. Thus
the scholar who values wholeness, who cultivates the ability to look
around his subject, to include every aspect, to throw forth tentacles
into related fields, will not be able to rival in quantitative productivity
the work of his predecessors, who confined themselves to a narrow
segment. In each case, something must be sacrificed: if not the man
himself, then mechanical skill, refinement of detail, speed, output per
man hour or per lifetime. Though productivity may decrease, the dura-
bility of the product will go up. With our new standard in mind, it is
apparent that a large part of the past two centuries’ production, in
both cities and institutions and books, will have to be done over — and
done fight.

3: TYPES AND TEMPERAMENTS

One of the most pressing problems of our age, that of creating the
human basis for our universal culture, would be easy to solve if all
human beings were fundamentally alike in their constitution and their
functions: the assumption that one could pay attention to human like-
nesses and disregard their differences was, indeed, one of the beliefs
that buoyed up Christian missionary enterprise and made somewhat
too lightly sanguine the rational-minded philosophers of the eighteenth
century.

By now, however, we are almost inclined, by reason of the vast
amount of scientific data that has accumulated in both physiology and
anthropology, to over-emphasize men’s differences: apart from the ob-
vious differences in color that men have always recognized between the
major races of man, we find differences in blood-types and various
other physical components: we even assume, with a fairly high degree
of probability, that no two sets of fingerprints are identical No longer
do we expect to find universal man in nature: he is not a natural organ-
ism but an ideal type, a product — ^to the extent that he exists at all —

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193

of effort and culture; a type that overlays biological, regional, occu-
pational, cultural differences.

In the matter of balance, we encounter the same original difficulties
that we do in the case of universality. From the time of the Greeks, if
not before, students of human nature have recognized definite physio-
logical and temperamental types. The classic division between the
choleric and the sanguine, the phlegmatic and the melancholy, has in
our time been re-discovered and re-appraised through our increased
knowledge of the functioning of the endocrines and their effect upon
bodily structure, functional response, and character. In personal ex-
pression, another kind of division discloses itself: that named by Jung
in his description of the extravert and the introvert: the first outward-
turning, active, dominating, externalized, the second inward-turning,
passive, withdrawing, internalized. Nothing is more rare, perhaps, than
an even distribution of character-traits or a fine, delicately maintained
balance between introversion and extraversion.

If a division corresponding to the four temperaments were a clear-
cut one, as some of the cruder accounts of physique and character have
assumed, there would be little hope of creating balanced personalities:
at best, one would have to outfit each particular temperament with a
philosophy and a code of ethics suitable for it, without even William
James’s hope of finding some pragmatic middle way between the tough-
minded and the tender-minded. Fortunately, Dr William H. Sheldon
has made a radical reorientation in this whole field, by finding a more
fundamental kind of constitutional division than earlier investigators
had discovered: a division related to that which goes on in the devel-
oping embryo when the three layers of the blastula — ^the ectoderm, the
mesoderm, and the endoderm — differentiate into their special organs:
the nervous system, the skeletal and muscular structure, and the in-
ternal organs. Obviously every human being contains all three ele-
ments: Sheldon’s special contribution is to attach a numerical scale
to each component. This device enables him to describe personality,
not merely by the dominant traits — sometimes misleading, always in-
complete — ^but by the proportions of the mixture.

Dr Sheldon calls his personality types the cerebral, the visceral,
and the muscular types. The first tends to think its way through life:
the second to feel its way: the third to fight ^its way. Withdrawal and
inner concentration go with the cerebral type: for the sake of the mind,
he minimizes bodily enjoyment and shrinks from activity. Sociability
and hearty bodily appetites go with the visceral type; while muscular

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THE CONDUCT OE LIFE

exercise and organized activity go with the muscular ones. The way of
the first is a difficult, lonely climb, with sparse rations and a slippery
foothold, mainly for the sake of enjoying the view when he reaches
the top. The second performs a Bacchic dance through life, up hill and
down dale, with quick senses and “storm-swift” feet: ever ready to
pause for wine and food, for sexual intercourse and blissful sleep,
not least, for dreams. The third type maiches through life, often in
squads and companies, muscles tense, eyes aggressively set on the
enemy, never stopping to meditate or to feel: becoming easily demor-
alized, like Samson in Delilah’s arms, if once he relaxes into the life
of feeling.

In sociological terms, first outlined by Auguste Comte, the cerebrals
become, ideally, the intellectuals: the theologians, the philosophers,
the scientists, the symbolizers and system-makers: the viscerals are the
“women,” or as Geddes and Branford termed them, the emotionals
and expressionals: artists and poets and lovers, articulate in their
senses, rich in images and sounds, their minds nourished and fertilized
by their erotic life: while the muscular types are the chiefs, the lead-
ers and organizers, the men of action, distrustful of all thought or feel-
ing that would weaken their capacity for struggle or divert them from
their practical goals. By various combinations of these fundamental
attitudes, one arrives at the almost inexhaustible richness and variety
of human society, in which pure types are an impossibility, relatively
pure types a rarity, and a balance between the three in any one per-
sonality perhaps even more singular.

There is nothing esoteric or academic about the general theory of
bodily types in relation to character and human potentiality: it is
rather massively confirmed by common observation. The differences
in outlook and capacity between Prince Hal and Falstaff, between Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza, are properly associated in our minds with
their respective physical appearances. Similarly the Greeks, in their
idealizations of womanhood, differentiated between the lithe muscular
huntress, Artemis, the cerebral Athene who had even been born from
the brow of Jove, and the visceral Aphrodite, who would have been
spoiled for the offices of love and their further consequences in child-
birth, if her muscles had been hardened and tightened in the chase, or
if intellectual specialization had anesthetized her capacities for erotic
response — ^that curse of the intellectual woman, unwilling to yield to
her body or abate the compensatory exercise of her cerebral functions.
Mind and spirit operate in and through the body: even when they

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transcend it, they are modified by its existence. If man’s life were only
a passing thought in the mind of God, that thought would have to in-
clude man’s bodily characteristics in order to evoke anything that
could be identified as man. That is why incidentally there is more rea-
son in the primitive Christian notion of the resurrection of the physical
body on the Day of Judgment, than in the gnostic fancy that spirit
has no need of matter. To be delivered from the prison of the body,
one must assimilate the social ways and spiritual creations of other
bodily types and characters.

If man had lived according to his own nature exclusively, he would
still exist in a state of animal-like obedience to his instinctual im-
pulses and his endocrines: the history of human society, therefore, is
the story of the increasing influence of nurture over nature, of ego and
super-ego over id. To some extent, every individual must respect his
biological endowment and live in accordance with it: at the moment
of crisis, in Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, the giant Ferrovius dis-
covers that he is no meek Christian, but a man of angry passion and
aggressive muscular strength: had he failed to heed that call, he would
have died of frustration or humiliation. But one of the reasons for un-
derstanding one’s nature more thoroughly is to cease to be an auto-
matic victim of its pressures and claims: just because one is human,
with all three components present in one’s body, one may by educa-
tion and deliberate culture alter one’s original balance and offset the
bias of constitution and temperament.

Every theory of types, whether physiological or social, that seeks
to re-enforce the type at the expense of one’s common humanity must
prove in the end antagonistic to growth. This, in fact, is the curse of
every caste system, and equally the curse of every static division be-
tween functions and processes, which assumes that the only partly
used human being should conform to that division. If there were no
other reason to seek balance and universality, the need to remove
blockages to human growth and development would be sufficient to
justify it.

One of the reasons for the failure of the universal religions, per-
haps, to achieve the wide and inclusive mission they set for themselves,
is that the ideal person who gave the religion its stamp still bore too
plainly the mark of a single biological type: the cerebral one. Now
that mankind, to guarantee its survival and go further with its devel-
opment, must create a universal society, capable of embracing all men
as brothers, it must have as its dominant persona a mask that will fit

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every face, and a goal that promises to bring together, at a common
point, every particular mode of life. With the ideal balance dominant,
we shall offset weaknesses, correct partialities, and lay a basis for
mutual aid and reciprocal understanding. As the division of labor be-
tween the sexes is justified by their union to bring forth a new human
being, so the division of labor between the three personality-types will
be justified by their common parturition of a new kind of man, capable
of living in a unified world, adaptive to every kind of regional environ-
ment, embracing every manner of person and culture.

4: THE WHOLE MAN AS IDEAL TYPE

In reacting against tribalism, the classic religions have often under-
rated the qualities that are in fact conserved and furthered by the life
of the primary group and must, in some form, enter into its most ideal
expressions. The great historic exceptions to this generalization are, it
would seem, Confucianism and Olympian Hellenism; though in as far
as Jesus accepted the law of the Old Testament as basic for the New,
which transcended it, he, too, did justice to man’s original nature and
tribal culture. Each of these did in fact take in so much of the in-
instinctual human nature as to seem, to the followers of other reli-
gions, essentially worldly; or at all events insufficiently concerned
with the universal and the divine.

In analyzing the fundamental religious attitudes, one finds that they
correspond broadly with three general ways of approaching the world:
to attack, to hold fast, to retreat. Early in the present century, these
attitudes were characterized by the British scholar, Dr D. S. MacColl,
as the way of the Titan, the way of the Olympian, and the way of the
Pilgrim: respectively struggle, domination, withdrawal. Recently these
three attitudes have been further differentiated and described by
Charles Morris in a book called The Paths of Life. Here, following
Sheldon, Professor Morris distinguishes between the promethean, the
dionysian, and the buddhist components in all religions.

From the familiar example of Christianity, the Buddhist element
seems to most people the specifically religious one: the attitude of
detachment from eartlily life, leading to withdrawal, rejection, inhi-
bition, This element contrasts with the life-affirming dionysian ele-
ment: the exuberant display of animal vitality and the heightening of
all the moments of sensual erethism and efflorescence, in which the
visceral emphasis even turns the figure of the god, as in the various

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197

Greek representations of Bacchus, into a feminoid form, with promi-
nent breasts,* smooth musculature, rounded buttocks and a soft face.
The third component is that of Prometheus, engaged in a manful strug-
gle with the conditions of life: he who in our age exercises all those
faculties that go into mechanical invention and political organization,
but who was originally symbolized by the mythical hero who stole fire
from the gods for the sake of improving the lot of men on earth.

If Dr Sheldon’s analysis of constitutional sets proves valid, then
Morris’s endeavor to describe ideological interests and total life-re-
sponse in terms of the physiological type of the believer is equally
sound: though only on the same terms of inter-mixture that Sheldon
has established for body and personality. The domination of one or
another attitude in the original formulation and incarnation of a reli-
gion tends to explain in no little degree what happens at a later stage,
when it draws in an increasingly nondescript and non-selective body
of believers. At that moment, every universal creed must find a way
of providing for the participation of people whose organic dispositions
provide a different constellation of natural needs and interests than
those that entered into the early intuitions and dogmas.

All these compensatory phenomena, which to the practitioner of reli-
gion seem backslidings and betrayals, can be interpreted in a more
understanding psychological way. What are they but attempts to re-
establish an organic balance which a too one-sided insistence on a
single need and response has upset? At some time in every religion,
the ideal type that has been chosen must confront that part of the per-
sonality it has left out of account: it must face the facts of nature and
include them within the purview of its ultimate ideal.

The ideal types that Charles Morris has ably interpreted are capable
of one further correlation: that in time. This increases their value
from the standpoint of the philosophy of balance. Going back to Mac-
Coil’s division, the three phases of personality may likewise be corre-
lated in his scheme with the three main phases of life. The olympian
or dionysian element, springing out of vitality and health, tending
toward playful expression and enjoyment, with its dilation of the
senses and its exuberance of erotic activity — what is this but the phase
of youth? Here are the potentialities of the normal human being, be-
fore illness, family responsibilities, vocational disappointments, or
physical injuries have subdued its vitality. The olympians know neither
satiety, exhaustion, nor the prospect of death: in the gleam of each
new morning, they recover their youth.

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As for the promethean type, which MacColl calls the Titanic, with
its high degree of purposive activity, its inventiveness and its system-
atic effort, its concentration on work, its acceptance of hard tasks and
responsibilities, its constant struggles and agonies, its narrowing down
of the sensuous life, with its tendency to over-value its vocational skills
even to the point of accepting bodily malformations, like the black-
smith’s callus, the professor’s stoop, this is surely the idealization of
man in middle age, wracked and buffeted about, like cunning Odys-
seus, in the long Odyssey of middle life. Promethean man, who has
put his youth completely behind him, despises the dionysian elements
for the same reason that the utilitarian Gradgrinds of the nineteenth
century, who built Birminghams and Manchesters where even children
were given no chance to play, despised the frivolous idlers of the
British aristocracy, the surviving olympians of another order.

Dedication and commitment: blood, sweat, and tears: that is the way
of Prometheus; and the work of the world is carried forward by those
who are prepared to sacrifice their digestions and even their warm do-
mestic relationships to see that it gets properly done. Without the
toughness and discipline of the muscular types, who impose their
mesomorphic pattern of life more or less upon all those of middle
age, the tasks of the organizer and the soldier, the colonizer and the
administrator, the engineer and the business enterpriser, would be only
half done. Countries like China and India, where the cerebral types
have dominated, and literary scholarship is the main requirement for
administrative office, now find themselves handicapped in their attempt
to create a more balanced civilization by an absence of prometheans,
people capable of standing up under the burden and the heat of the
day, who actually enjoy the struggle with refractory materials or hos-
tile men, which is so distasteful to the buddhist or dionysian tempera-
ment.

Finally, there comes a dark moment when the original life-impetus
begins to falter; when the animal vitality of youth and middle age
wane: when one’s best efforts have ended in at least partial failure;
when accident, disease, vocational crippling, have all taken their toll;
when the pleasures of the table or the bed no longer are irresistible,
or in fact seem a little childish, perhaps because the senses are becom-
ing dull, perhaps because one has repeated these acts once too often:
when, with lowered capacity and strength, the personality is pushed
down almost to the invalid’s level; and in order to have something
like an adequate response, one must reduce the number of possible

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199

occasions, guarding time, hoarding vitality, in order to make life go
a little further.

Enter the Pilgrim: no longer bent on achievement but rather ready
for disengagement and detachment, passing on the burdens of office to
others and even taking, like a Hindu holy man, to the open road. At
this point, life can be lived more completely in the mind, if only for
the reason that the other avenues of expression are slowly closing
down. At its best, this is the period celebrated by Po Chii-i in his
poem On Being Sixty. Between thirty and forty, he observes, one is
distracted by the Five Lusts; while between seventy and eighty one is
a prey to all manner of diseases; but from fifty to sixty, one is done
with profit and fame and has put behind one love and greed: “calm
and still — ^the heart enjoys rest.’’

At this downward cycle of life, every man becomes, if he is con-
scious of his destiny, a “Buddhist.” For now death makes his ap-
pearance, not as a passing stranger to whom one waves at a distance
and never expects to meet in one’s home, but as a constant companion
whom one cannot shake off. By this time, in the normal course of age,
the death of friends, relatives, companions, magnifies the steady shrink-
age of life that is going on in a man’s own body: the dimming of the
eyes, the falling out of the hair, the wrinkling and sagging of the
skin, the increasing sense of fatigue in tasks one once took in one’s
stride. With this shrinkage goes a further withdrawal of interest from
the external world: the inner deafness and blindness of the aged, which
so often precedes any actual impairment of their organs. To make the
most of what remains, one must turn one’s back on life’s fullness: it is
a time for reducing the intake of food, for curbing too exhausting ex-
ercises, for falling back on memory, reflection, revery — and in happier
souls, a time for a more intense inner life, like Titian and Renoir, still
painting gloriously in their eighties.

From the outgoingness of youth to the withdrawn-ness and ingoing-
ness of age: from the visceral life of infancy through the muscular life
of maturity on to the cerebral life of senescence: that is the trajectory
of life. Yet as all three components of the body are present, in some
proportion, at every stage, so all three components of time are like-
wise present in every moment. Life as a whole exercises a determining
influence upon each phase that it enters; and too great a segregation
in time is as conducive to unbalance as too complete a segregation of
functions and activities. Each part of life is good in its own right; yet
part of its meaning lies in what it contributes to other phases. Educa-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

tion, in the past, tried to turn children prematurely into adults; but
today there is a tendency to isolate childhood and to limit its activities
to those that give pleasure or make sense within its own limited role.
The principle of balance applies likewise to time: each phase should
bear within it, either as experience or symbol, some portion of the
absent whole. Shallow is the youth that is not by anticipatory dream
committed to maturity: unillumined is the maturity that has not
achieved the self-criticism that comes with detachment: empty and dry
is the old age that has not a touch of youth’s irresponsibility and
levity.

Is it any wonder, then, that all the phases of life have been embod-
ied in the great religions; or rather, that each of them has claimed
for itself one sector or another of the great arc so described, and has
even tended to give that phase of life exclusive right to represent the
whole? But no historic religion has yet sought to sustain life in its
fullness and wholeness.

There is one other point that remains to be noted in this correlation
of the phases of religion with the constitution of persons and the cycle
of life. Because all these processes, all these types, belong to life in
its full development, there is a sense in which they are interchangeable,
too. The young who went to war and faced deprivation and death every
day, came back, even if they were not physically mutilated, far older
than their outward appearance indicated: old men, blessed with a pre-
mature patience and resignation that had nothing to do with their years,
often cursed by the memory of horrors they were too tender to look
at, still less to endure. Similarly, a severe illness, a crippling accident
in early life — see that fine human document, The Little Locksmith, by
Katharine Butler Hathaway — ^will bring about an attitude of senes-
cence even in earliest childhood.

But in a culture like that of contemporary America, just the oppo-
site change may happen. Because we are committed far too heavily to
the promethean way of life, a bastard dionysian element may be in-
troduced as compensation: infantile oral sexuality in the form of smok-
ing, or equally infantile sensual enjoyment through overdoses of candy,
ice-cream sundaes, and similar sweets. Such rituals at once promote
further business and offset at a low level the effects of mechanical con-
centration. Similarly, this suppressed dionysian element will draw even
the aged into sexual exploits that no longer comport with either their
years or supposed experience of life. Note how the matrons of this cul-
ture will undergo endless efforts of gymnastic and cosmetic to heavily

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201

counterfeit the vitalities that are naturally at the disposal of their
daughters.

What holds for the individual again holds in civilization as a whole ;
for though the personality is an emergent from community, the rela-
tionship is interdependent and interacting. Faced with the terrible de-
vitalizations produced by the Black Death in the fourteenth century,
the first response to death was that of withdrawal. Even so worldly a
writer as Boccaccio disclaimed his popular erotic tales and turned to
writing the soberest religious tracts, precisely as Tolstoy, facing old
age and death, deserted his magnificent novels. But presently the em-
phasis shifted again in the sixteenth century from senescence to youth:
wnth rising vitality came a promethean concentration on the machine
and a dionysian interest in sexual expression; and these two move-
ments led to the recovery and expansion of Western civilization, after
it had reached a lower state of physical depletion than Rome had
reached at the end of the fourth century.

In every phase of life, then, we can single out moments of aflBrma-
tive absorption and moments of negation and detachment: moments
of elation and engagement, and moments of desolation and disengage-
ment: while between them there stand out moments of activistic strug-
gle, to which both plus and minus signs may be prefixed. In other words,
the Dionysian, the Buddhist, and the Promethean are always with us;
indeed, if they have their roots in the constitution of the body itself,
as we have reason to think, this could hardly be otherwise. But it is
only as concepts that these forms can be found in a pure state: life
makes mock of purely logical divisions. Buddhism itself, for example,
would seem free from any ideal propensity to transform the environ-
ment by the application of technics: yet a promethean element crept
into the inner core of this religion, in prayer itself, through the inven-
tion of the prayer wheel; a means of ensuring salvation by the mass-
production of prayers.

So, too, in Western culture, with its devout worship of its own Holy
Trinity, Militarism, Mechanism, and Money, a strong life-denying ele-
ment persists. Even today^ — and of course still more under the capi-
talism of the nineteenth century — the exhausting routine of the factory
and the office, the harsh drill and discipline of the army, reduce the
urges and enjoyments of organic existence to a minimum. Read the
biographies of the early inventors and entrepreneurs: above all the
story of the workers who were sacrificed to their hard, inhuman ambi-
tions: you read a story of mortifications and self-flagellations that

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

match anything in medieval hagiology. Robert Gair, the paper manu-
facturer, abandoned a honeymoon in order to consummate a profitable
business deal. That tale can be repeated with a hundred variations.

The sense of worldly guilt and damnation, which Protestantism
found in its soul, was no doubt eased by this new form of self-punish-
ment, though it worked out ambivalently, since great were the financial
rewards of those who thriftily renounced immediate enjoyment. Even
more definitely, a cerebral element of life-rejection enters into the
dominant attitude of the scientist: it is the essence of the post-Galilean
methodology. For the world, as conceived by Galileo, Newton, and
Descartes was a world stripped of all its dionysian qualities: a world
in which color, form, pattern, sound were meaningless, except as
mathematical quantities, and in which feeling and desire and imagina-
tion were disreputable.

This translation of Christian life-negation into a far more pervasive
and inescapable system of rejection and mental ascesis w^as one of the
feats of cultural sleight-of-hand that accompanied the transition from
the medieval to modern order. Perhaps some of the spiritual authority
that now adheres to science derives from the fact that the scientists
have been the authentic saints of the modern age. From Copernicus to
Pascal, from Faraday and Henry to Einstein, they have set an example
of high spiritual devotion, untainted by the pomps and lusts of a
wicked world. This has given their mode of thought the authentic re-
ligious stamp that moves tlie masses of men.

As for the promethean religious ideology, it is associated with the
effort of the activist, energetic, muscular types to turn their own bodily
prowess first of all toward the direct domination and enslavement of
other men. The Persians, the Spartans, the Norsemen, the Moslem
Arabs, and the Turks conceived existence as a struggle, with hardships
and penalties as a, natural accompaniment to all activities. Meeting
obstacles in the purposes of other men, these groups intensify their
own naturally aggressive and sadistic reactions: with whip and rod,
with fire and sword, with plague and famine, they and their Gods seek
to dominate their fellow-men. The world, during the last three cen-
turies, was colonized by Prometheans, who treated nature as ruthlessly
as they treated the underlying populations: today the very existence
of life on this planet is threatened by tlieir pathologically one-sided
descendants, whose commitment to the destructive processes has now
been amplified beyond all sanity by the conquest of atomic energy in

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203

the West, and the building up of great nationalist military machines
in Russia and China.

Promethean forms of religion, and notably that of Russian com-
munism, in our own day, are an expression of the over-valuation of
struggle as a formative element in life: it was not for nothing that^
Marx and Engels hailed Darwin’s ^‘struggle for existence” as an essen-
tial ingredient of dialectical materialism. This prometheanism has
little use for the slow processes of maturation and growth: rather, it
must deny slow organic procedures in order to confirm its own con-
viction that physical power, if wielded ruthlessly, can avoid the need
for more complex and co-operative methods of change; mutual aid.
Though the aim of the Prometheans is power, they punish themselves
almost as violently as they punish their conquered peoples: witness
the cruel disciplinary practices in the British public schools in the
heyday of the Empire, or the whole training and discipline of the Prus-
sian officer caste, including the saber cuts that the members of the stu-
dent corps proudly courted and counted on their own faces.

The chief refractory element in a society dominated by promethean
values is woman ; for she cannot, without renouncing her own biological
role, turn away completely from sensual delight and organic fulfill-
ment in child-bearing: against the relatively katabolic and destructive
male, her own body preaches the lessons of consumption and growth,
of yielding to life and enjoying its fruits. Promethean man, not able
to take woman’s role seriously without partly denying the validity of
his own narrow concerns, reduces her to a plaything: typically, the
delectable houri in whose arms the Moslem warrior, dying in battle
for Islam, will transact an eternity of sensual bliss. Even here prome-
thean man is often the victim of his paranoid ambitions and his com-
pulsive routines: he loses the sympathetic delights of sexual union in
a tyrannous routine of record-making.

Each of the classic religions, we see, reveals and in some degree
depresses the ideal dimensions of the human personality. Under the
pressure of the immediate historic situation, in which these religions
took form, they have failed to embrace the full life of man, in its or-
ganic diversity and variety. No matter how catholic or universal the
professions of the classic religions, they have left out of account much
that it was important to include both in doctrine and in practice: where-
fore the wisdom of the race is contained, not alone in the sacred books,
but in the immense secular literature that has grown up beside these
books. In the effort to achieve a balanced personality and a universal

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

culture, we must offset these tendencies to over-prize a single type of
personality-structure and a single way of life.

On this point, Patrick Geddes’s words confirm the intuitions and
practices of Sri Ramakrishna, he who sought to understand other forms
-of religion than his own by putting their doctrine and precepts experi-
mentally into practice. These insights are a salutory challenge to the
tendency of every religion to regard its own truth as the highest and
completest form of revelation: so high that it can overlook other truths,
so complete that it can exclude them. “All the gospels,” Geddes af-
firmed, “are various views of life, and all true — as far as they go. All
the myths are true, too. It is pitiful nonsense that one has heard, ever
since Darwin frightened the curates: '"Do you mean to say you believe
in the Bible?’ spoken in a fearful voice by would-be scientific folk. Of
course I believe in the Bible . . . and in the Koran, and in all the
bibles of all peoples, whether savages or Buddhists, Celts or Chris-
tians. To those storehouses of past wisdom one makes one’s own con-
tribution. I make mine by seeing that life is bigger and more wonder-
ful than has been thought; and that all the gospels put together cannot
encompass it.”

Just as in the coming Constitution of a World Government no tribe
or region must be overlooked or neglected, or permitted to remain
cut off from conversation and co-operation with the rest of mankind
whenever it manifests a desire for them, so no part of the human con-
stitution may be neglected in our effort to achieve the universal: we
must even provide harmless outlets for irrationality and aggression,
in order that we may not be maimed by their repression and unseemly
eruption. Every personality bears the stamp of its individual unique-
ness, irreplaceable in every dimension, identifiable in the very whorls
of its fingerprints. Each personality, too, bears the imprint of its type,
its biological type, its social type, its class-conditioning and its total
cultural conditioning, so that its uniqueness still falls into many de-
finable types and categories. Finally, every personality bears the im-
print of the universal: that which is viable in all situations, translatable
into all tongues, not merely because it issues out of the common human
lot, but because it indicates a resolution to create and participate in
a common destiny. When man ignores this universal aspect, his whole
life breaks down, and in compensation he will seek to make some minor
form of unity, that of the tribe or the self -enclosed ego, take the place
of the whole. Every mode of unity by suppression mars the purpose
it professes to serve: only unity by inclusion in an expanding and

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forever unfinished whole is capable of doing justice to the uniqueness
and inexhaustible promise of man’s nature.

We have now reached a turning point in mankind’s history, when
we must consciously include, in our ideological and religious concep-
tions of the nature and destiny of man, the three fundamental com^
ponents that have so far tended separately to seek exclusive domina-
tion. Each world view, each system of life, must add to its fundamental
doctrines precisely those elements that are lacking: elements over
whose absence — as in the case of the scientific ideology — it has some-
times foolishly taken pride. Each fundamental type of life-experience
must find itself represented in the new synthesis of ideas and values:
each must be capable of participating, in some degree, in the life-
attitudes and expectancies, in the hopes and dreams and actions, that
are native to the other type. Only such religions as are capable of un-
dergoing this re-orientation will have a creative part to play in form-
ing the universal society and the balanced man. Toward that objective,
many other activities must be subordinated.

5 : THE INCARNATION OF BALANCE

No system of philosophy, no institution of religion, no social move-
ment has yet fully exhibited the characteristics of wholeness and au-
tonomy and universality that will be sufficient, when incorporated into
our daily practices, to save mankind from the destructive forces now
at work.

Put alongside the demands of this protracted crisis, our minds seem
unstirred, our feelings numbed, our actions unenlightened and feeble:
Hermann Broch’s epithet. The Sleepwalkers, characterizes both the
leaders and the led with strict accuracy. Docile automatons, we prepare
for our own destruction and even, by our urgent unfeeling actions, we
hasten the result. Who among us, during the last half-century, can pre-
tend that he has not carried on at least part of his life in almost trance-
like unconsciousness of the evils that have threatened, and still threaten,
himself and his fellows? In this respect possibly the worst offenders
are those our civilization most reveres: its pure scientists. For it is hard
to break good habits; harder than to break bad ones. Even he whose
life I shall presently hold up as an example perhaps chose the easier
way, rather than the right way, when, despite his perception of the
extent of the threatening world catastrophe, he left Europe again after
the First World War and turned back to his mission in Africa.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Yet, here and there in our society, individual men and women have
appeared who prefigure, in their lives and actions, the collective trans-
formations that must take place; they are like the Essenes, the Thera-
peutae, the mystery cults, that heralded the coming of Christianity.
-Sometimes they are entirely humble people who, by a single act, dem-
onstrate that they know better than the actual leaders of our society
tlie radical shift in attitude that is needed if we are to lay the founda-
tions for a better life. Such a person was the owner of a warehouse
corporation in New York, Mr James J. O’Neill. When the United Na-
tions needed to transport their cumbersome records and belongings to
another building, he carried through the w^hole costly operation with-
out charging for his services; not in the full light of publicity, for the
sake of indirect advantage, but modestly, quietly, to demonstrate his
faith in this institution: so that his act came to light only when the
officials of the United Nations properly paid him public thanks.

That individual act, setting at nought the established patterns of
commercial activity by its renunciation of profit, its sacrifice of even
a minimum normal compensation, testified to an unconditional com-
mitment to the ideal of world unity. Such a person, too, was the Amer-
ican painter, Mr Harold Weston, who in the early part of the Second
World War, when most officials in the American government were en-
grossed solely with military preparations, conceived the postwar neces-
sity of an international organization devoted to the succor and the re-
habilitation of starving peoples whose homes had been destroyed,
whose lands had been devastated. Instead of leaving that thought
alone, as an idle dream, or dismissing it as an officious suggestion to
come from an artist, this man besieged the official world at Washing-
ton. Those in power, at first obstinately opposed to such an ‘‘‘‘untimely”
suggestion, were almost shocked by it. Fortunately, by sheer moral
conviction and determination, Mr Weston not merely got a hearing
for the idea but finally saw it embodied in the organization later known
as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

No less decisive an exponent of active personal responsibility was
Mr R. L. Humber: the author of the Humber resolution in favor of
World Government, passed by many State Legislatures in America.
Not content to wait for national action, this far-seeing advocate from
North Carolina conducted a personal campaign in state after state to
convince his fellow legislators that, for the good of their local com-
munity, no less than the world, they must further and re-enforce the
process of creating, out of the present imperfect union of jealous sov-

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207

ereign states, an effective World Federation. The method was as ad-
mirable as the objective: for Mr Humber understood that no univer-
salism was possible that did not have its origin and its sanction in the
local community. By reasoned argument and quiet persistent effort
this one man started a movement of great potentiality — though it ha S'"
since been th waited by servile fears and reactionary suspicions. But
had there been as many as a dozen men, similarly possessed by this
idea, similarly ready for action, similarly capable of self-sacrificing
personal effort, neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties
would have lapsed so quickly into an improvident belligerence or a
pusillanimous isolationism — both based on a superstitious faith in the
magic properties of the atomic bomb.

These are but a few examples, accidentally known to me, among
thousands, scattered through every country: equally heroic and de-
cisive. By such a willingness to break with the comfortable automatisms
of the past and to participate in acts of world unity and integration, a
new attitude will be passed from these leaders to other members of
our society: each personal choice, each individual commitment, will
confirm the new ideology and put it to the test of effective action. On
the other hand, without the support of an ideal purpose, framed in a
conscious philosophy, even the most impersonal and self-sacrificing
acts, like those of the soldiers who fought under the United Nations
flag in Korea, will fail of their full effect.

From many possible witnesses, in our own age, I shall turn to one
whose long career affords a classic example of renewal and integra-
tion. I choose Albert Schweitzer because his life is in outline already
familiar to many readers; and because his books, the conscious ex-
pression of his philosophy, are accessible in many languages. But it
is on his life rather than on his writings that I shall concentrate; for
his actions have transcended the limitations of his thought. Schweitzer’s
conscious philosophy, from my standpoint, is sometimes contradictory
and inadequate: in the world of ideas, to speak with candor, he is not
one of the greatest luminaries. But his intuitions are better integrated
than his reasons; and the transformation effected in the life and work
of Schweitzer is more profound and more widely significant than the
best ideas he has yet formulated. From his actions, one may deduce
a fuller philosophy than that which has consciously guided him. And
through his masterly example, the task of formulation becomes an
easier one.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Consider the course of Albert Schweitzer’s life. He began as a stu-
dent of philosophy who turned to Christian theology; and in his early
twenties he did so brilliantly at his chosen career that honors and fame
would have come to him rapidly, had he been content with the role of
pastor and theologian. Within the theological world, he was plainly
one of the olympians: he might have lived and died in that role, like
so many other churchmen, preaching the doctrines of a religion he
had never tested or practiced by any major act: the willing observer
of outward forms and ceremonies, the happy recipient of worldly
courtesies and worldly honors.

Fortunately, one of Schweitzer’s early studies was an intimate ex-
amination of the life of Jesus, whom he rescued from the fashionable
impugners and devaluators by a more rigorous use of the very historic
method they had used for deflating him. This brought him to the con-
viction that a true believer in Jesus must, in the twentieth century, take
up the cross himself and perform some redemptive work of sacrifice.
Such a work would not bring fame and honor, but, more probably,
neglect, ill-health, possibly death, if not also contumely and oblivion.
Plainly many evils need to be abated: many sins Western society has
committed cry for atonement. With a vigilant eye, Schweitzer picked
a classic example: the degradation of primitive peoples through im-
perialist exploitation, often coming on top of a primitive life that in
itself, by reason of its own ignorance, superstition, and brutality did
violence to the human spirit.

Hence Schweitzer decided, like many another fervent Christian, to
become a missionary. But since nothing could be more ironic than to
carry the word of redemption to people too sunken in disease to be
made whole, Schweitzer again followed Jesus’s example: he would
heal the sick while bringing the Gospel to them, and that healing should
be no small part of his gospel. With that decision, the neophyte threw
aside the honors of the theologian and settled down to the hard disci-
pline of the medical student: the “Buddhist” gave place to the Prome-
thean.

Those four years of medical preparation were doubtless difficult
enough in themselves even to an able student of the humanities, trained
in the rigorous scholarly discipline of a European university like
Strasbourg; but they required a further intensity of concentration for
the reason that Schweitzer, instead of closing up all the other channels
of life, kept his emotions and feelings quick, by his cultivation of mu-
sic as an organist. Through his special knowledge of Johann Sebastian

THE FULFILLMENT OF MAN

209

Bach, Schweitzer brought into circulation again many precious scores
that had been completely overlooked. As organist, as musicologist,
above all as lover of music, Schweitzer served Dionysus as well as
Christ: that constant concern with music, throughout his toilsome life,
made his wholeness and balance an exemplary one.

In philosophy or theology, in medicine or in music, Schweitzer’s
talents were sufficient to guarantee him a career of distinction: as one
of the eminent specialists of his time, in any of these departments, his
success would have been prompt and profitable, just to the extent that
he allowed himself to be absorbed in a single activity. But in order to
remain a whole man, Schweitzer committed the typical act of sacrifice
for the coming age; he deliberately reduced the intensive cultivation
of any one field, in order to expand the contents and the significance
of his life as a whole. Doubtless the humility that made it possible for
him to entertain such a sacrifice derived directly from his Christian
convictions: yet the result of that sacrifice was not the negation of his
life but its fullest realization; for even in the humid jungles of Africa,
where he finally made his home, he kept alive his highly cultivated
interest in music: not merely having his organ by his side, but finding
time, despite a lack of the usual scholarly apparatus, to write a life
of Bach.

Both in his work as a medical missionary and in his public appear-
ance as an organist, Schweitzer, who was a German by birth, performed
another act of symbolic importance: an act perhaps easier, more natu-
ral, in the international world before 1914 than in our own day. For
Schweitzer’s field of action was less in his own original fatherland,
among the people who spoke his preferred language, than in the coun-
try of its rival, and presently its active enemy, France: in that sense,
he was another Jean-Christophe. So it was to an unattractive colony in
French West Africa, in the steaming equatorial jungle, that he turned
for a field of endeavor. There, with occasional intervals abroad for
lecturing and organ playing — including the interval he spent as a
prisoner of war in France, in the very hospital at Saint Remy where
Van Gogh, another imitator of Jesus, had been confined — ^he has lived
his life: serving a God who recognizes neither white nor black, neither
French nor German.

Without that devaluation and renunciation of nationalism, no life
worthy of tlie name can now be built up. He who is one hundred per
cent an American or a Russian, a German or a Frenchman, a Euro-
pean or an African or an Asiatic, is only half a man: the universal part

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

of his personality, equally essential to his becoming human, is still
imborn. Every act that softens the egoistic claims of nations and accen-
tuates the unity of mankind, adds another foundation stone to the new
world that we must now build.

^ All the great spirits of our time participate with Schweitzer in this
devaluation of nationalism and this lowering of barriers. Vivekananda,
breaking the Brahmin’s rule against overseas travel to come to the
Congress of Religions in America and to carry his mission to Europe:
Patrick Geddes, spending ten of the best years of his life in India, ex-
ploring its living resources and planning its cities in consonance with
its own mode of life: Gandhi, breaking down caste lines that are even
more inviolate and obsessive than national barriers: Nansen, the ex-
plorer, engaged on a universal rescue expedition, so that even the form
of an international passport under the League of Nations, the first
prophecy of world citizenship, bore his name — all these people, break-
ing down the walls of hateful egoism and aggressive pride, which keep
men apart, are at the same time bearers of cultural pollen: producers
of those cultural hybrids which, Flinders Petrie long ago remarked,
are no less superior in civilization than in farming.

By the same token, the intense isolationism and xenophobia of the
Russian communists has undermined the original universality of their
doctrine, even as that of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a
somewhat less influential body, has undermined the universal prin-
ciples of an earlier American revolution. Nothing could in fact prove
more surely that Russified communism is not the creed of the opening
age, but rather its desperate antagonist, its would-be destroyer, than the
fact that it now denounces ^^cosmopolitanism,” and not merely fails to
propagate, but even refuses theoretically to sanction, any ideas and
forces of a imiversal character. There is something colossally comic
in the essential identity in attitude toward the universal expressed by
the Soviet rulers, the reactionary and repressive sons of one revo-
lution, and their spiritual counterparts in America, the equally reac-
tionary and would-be repressive daughters of another. Against such
perversions and pandemonium the universalism of Schweitzer’s mis-
sion stands out.

Schweitzer’s arduous career as a medical missionary condemned
him to a long period of relative obscurity. But at the same time it
gave him a perspective on Western life that determined the further
direction of his thinking: it was such an act of detachment as leads
to a more inclusive view of man and his destiny than any closer in-

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211

volvement in immediate issues can give. As a result, Schweitzer’s two-
volume diagnosis of our Time of Troubles counts among the earliest
contributions to an adequate self-analysis of our civilization: differing
from the earlier forecasts of Burckhardt and Henry Adams because
Schweitzer, like a good physician, regards his prognosis, not as et
death sentence, but as an incentive to rational action.

Published a few years after Spengler’s Decline of the West, Schweit-
zer’s studies, grouped under the general title of The Philosophy of
Civilization, were plainly conceived independently of Spengler’s work
and were unaffected by it, though they pictured, as unsparingly as
Spengler had done, the disintegrating forces that were already visibly
at work. The lack of human values and ethical principles, in our posi-
tivistic, mechanical civilization, was on Spengler’s diagnosis the most
serious cause of our ills. Instead of urging, as Spengler did, a willing
submission to the processes of barbarism, as the implacable destiny of
Western man in our time, Schweitzer urged a return to the generous
cosmopolitan humanism of the eighteenth century.

Here is an indication of Schweitzer’s intuitive grasp. Though he
himself followed the way of Jesus, he recognized the original limita-
tions of Jesus’s thought: it was the product of a parochial, self-centered
culture, obsessed by the myth of national deliverance through the
agency of a Messiah, while Jesus himself, as Schweitzer had demon-
strated, erroneously regarded the approaching end of the world as a
determining factor in human conduct. Schweitzer saw that the ethical
foundations for a world society had been laid, not by Jesus nor even
yet by the Christian Church, but by the great Chinese sages, Confucius,
Mencius, and Mo-Ti: the translation of their thought, even indirectly,
which accompanied the introduction of porcelain and silk and wall-
paper into Europe, had a formative effect on some of the best minds
of the eighteenth century and gave to its ethics, no less than to its
gardens or its tea-tables, a Chinese cast: Chinese in origin but as wide
in its province as humanity itself.

Coming from a Christian, a Christian by active consecration as well
as formal espousal, Schweitzer’s doctrine revealed the depth of his
insight; for against the formalism of theology, he saw that the eight-
eenth century had been, in fact, a time when Christian doctrine, often
abandoned in formula, was perhaps as active in actual life as it had
been in the Middle Ages, encouraging men to mildness of conduct,
even in the midst of war, to a common understanding and a tolerance
of imderlying differences, to universal enterprises that tended to make

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212

the world one. This century produced international philanthropists
like John Howard and international patriots like Thomas Paine.

Men like Howard and Paine undoubtedly under-rated the forces of
a closed society, as did the new eighteenth century Order of Free
-Masonry; by failing to do justice to the domestic self-containment of
the primary group, they perhaps even contributed in some measure
to the nationalist reaction, which began ideologically with Rousseau
and Herder, and practically, with the French revolution. But the belief
in the possibility of universal standards and universal goals, applying
to the actions of men because they shared a common humanity, was
a healthy one; and Schweitzer recognized that fact. Note that the
title of Part Two is not Religion and Civilization but Ethics and
Civilization.

Among American theologians it has become the fashion to speak of
ethics without religion as a mere cut flower, with no roots in the soil
of life: beautiful, perhaps, but doomed to wither. But careful historic
analysis shows that just the opposite is the truth; for ethics lies in the
common earth of life, with roots that go deep into our animal ances-
tors; while religion, though it takes us to the mountain top and dis-
closes vistas that stretch far beyond our common daily horizon, pro-
duces wider ethical imperatives only because it rests securely on an
older ethical order. On the basis of animal loyalty and love the higher
values, the divine sanctions, become possible.

Schweitzer’s affirmation of eighteenth century cosmopolitanism, lib-
eralism, and optimism, contrasts with Reinhold Niebuhr’s unfavorable
interpretation of the same period. Though Niebuhr’s insight into the
shallowness and vanity of the eighteenth century philosophe is a salu-
tary corrective to latter-day smugness, Schweitzer’s appreciation of
valuable insights that have been lost or actively discarded seems to me
equally relevant. How difficult it is in our time to achieve this univer-
salism, Schweitzer’s own work abundantly demonstrates; for though
he wrote an extensive critique of Hindu philosophy and religion, even
he has been tempted at times to over-stress the differences between the
Christian and the Buddhist doctrine of love, treating the first as if it
were more life-furthering than it often was in practice, and treating
the latter as if it were wholly negative and life-denying, in its substitu-
tion of pity for love and abstention from violence for active succor.

Aware of the static nature of Hindu civilization, Schweitzer even
overlooks the affirmative aspect of the popular doctrine of reincarna-
tion, failing to interpret its truly progressive character and failing to

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213

see that it provides a more logical system of rewards and punishments
than the Christian conception of atonement; since it proportions heaven
to one’s deserts. For all his scholarship, such partiality to Christian
revelation weakens Schweitzer’s insight as an interpreter of the Hindu
religions: he lacks in some degree the Catholicism and the charity of
Archbishop Soderblom’s interpretation of The Living God. Despite
this, Schweitzer characteristically owes a great debt to Hindu religion
no less than to Chinese philosophy: for it is from Hinduism, rather
than from Christianity, that Schweitzer consciously or unconsciously
derived his central ethical doctrine: the reverence for life.

The transvaluation of established values, which Schweitzer has so
magnificently carried out in his own person, has been only partly ful-
filled in his philosophy: his ideas lack the organic wholeness of his
life. This arises from the fact that he abandons the attempt to achieve
a world picture capable of embracing both nature and man: though he
valiantly bases his interpretation of the non-human world on the sys-
tematic effort to achieve truth, he founds his system of ethics on some-
thing apart from this: the will-to-live.

Fundamentally, Schweitzer’s ethical doctrine merely turns that of
Schopenhauer upside down: instead of preaching that the will-to-live
is a curse, he embraces it as a blessing. But by divorcing ethics from
the larger evolutionary process, Schweitzer’s reverence for life must
in the end confront this final paradox: if all forms of life prospered
equally their very success would bring about life’s own end; and be-
fore that happened the higher forms would die out. No choice can be
sanely made in terms either of the will-to-live or the derivative doctrine
of unqualified reverence for life.

Fortunately, this criticism of Schweitzer’s philosophy does not sub-
tract any value from his example as a teacher; for there he occupies
a special pinnacle, by reason of his declared intention, so largely ful-
filled in his actual writings, to follow truth to its ultimate goal and to
abide by his findings. Note that intention and consider its applications:
it contrasts favorably with the attitude of many scientists, who mean
by truth only their system of truth; and who refuse even to look dis-
passionately into evidence that might compel a radical revision in their
own assumptions.

No integration is worthy of our time or adequate to its challenge
that seeks to unify men through a private system of truth: pace Gurdjiev
and Steiner. However feeble science and collective research have been
in establishing a valid life-wisdom, it is partly by further efforts in

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

science and philosophy, equally respectful of *^‘hard, irreducible facts”
in departments so far ignored, that we shall correct these failings. In
the highest type of person we can create today, fine thinking is as much
a mark of excellence as human-heartedness, and an unconditional
^dedication to verifiable truth is the manifestation of its righteousness.
Only through the guidance of man’s highest function, his mind, can
the claims of the rest of his life be fully expressed.

If Schweitzer’s conscious philosophy is not adequate to express all
that is implied in his living example, his life fortunately bodies forth
much for which even categories or symbols are lacking in most phi-
losophies: in the drama of his life, the philosophic implications of his
position become crystal-clear. As theologian, physician, and musician,
as thinker, man of action, and saint, Schweitzer has accepted ail the
hard claims of our time and performed, in admirable fashion, the
corresponding duties. None knows better than he, through experience,
that balance cannot be achieved without sacrifice: yet that balance it-
self counterweighs and nullifies the sacrifice by intensifying and ex-
panding the possibilities of life. Schweitzer’s moral greatness derives
from the fact that he has shown that it is feasible, without renouncing
the methods and insights of modern science, to achieve that which no
science, no philosophy, no religion as yet adequately teaches: the pos-
sibility of becoming a whole man and of living, even under hostile cir-
cumstances, a whole life.

In every conscious act, Schweitzer has gone about the process of re-
newal with exemplary swiftness, simplicity, and directness: a further
testimony to the soundness of his life-plan. One of the nurses in Schweit-
zer’s hospital has borne witness to this genius for simplification. “I
have never before,” she writes, ^‘seen an institution as personal as this
one; nor have I seen one in which there is such a painstaking, hand-
made element. There is originality and simplicity in the way every-
thing is arranged. Emphasis is always laid on whatever is most prac-
tical.” One might have deduced as much; but that testimony remains
precious. Embrangled in its complexities, our civilization has an es-
pecial need for such direct action, and such straight moving, such
rational simplification.

Albert Schweitzer’s life, therefore, is a sign and a pledge. His life
says, better than any book he has written, that however deeply our own
lives suffer from the passive breakdown or the active destruction of
our civilization, it is still possible to create a plan of life based on
more solid foundations and directed toward higher ends: a life more

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215

organic in structure, more personal in expression, no longer the victim
of specialism, nihilism, and automatism.

That this change cannot be effected easily goes without saying: noth-
ing short of an heroic effort, widely participated in, will suflice. Per-
haps few of us, no matter how resolute our understanding, will be able
to achieve the even development of our parts or the all-embracing har-
mony that Schweitzer in his own person has achieved. Nor need we
exaggerate Schweitzer’s own success in order to make the goal seem
more desirable: we must rather assume, since Schweitzer is hut hu-
man, that there are weaknesses, contradictions, failures in this life:
that in some degree he, too, remains incomplete, unbalanced, unful-
filled. All of us must live and act before we have perfected ourselves
for our new parts, since only through the action can we become more
perfect. So in the nature of things our best efforts will fall short.

But these reservations in no wise lessen the love and reverence
Schweitzer’s example commands: they are indeed assurances that the
ideal he sets before us is not an unapproachable ideal: rather, it is
just sufficiently beyond our normal habits and powers to introduce a
salutary tension into all our activities. In this true person, the springs
of life have started to flow again: presently, from a hundred similar
sources along the mountain side, other springs will pour their waters,
and a mighty stream will begin to carve a new channel through the
valley below. This new type of man, so different in his balance from
the Athenian or the Renascence gentleman, demonstrates the possibility
of re-directing the forces of our civilization, and creating a new work-
ing unity between our powers and our purposes, which will utilize
every suppressed or mutilated human potentiality.

External events beyond our human powers of control may for a
time make this growth abortive: that has happened before and it may
happen again. But if Western civilization escapes the evil fate that its
over-commitment to mechanism and automatism, its wholesale denial
of humane values and purposes, now threatens it with, if it overcomes
its delusions of atomic grandeur and its psychotic compulsions to sui-
cide or genocide, then the form that life will take, and the type of
personality that will nurture it, is the form and the type that Albert
Schweitzer has embodied. On such a basis, the renewal of life is
possible.

CHAPTER VIIL

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

J: THE OPTIMISM OF PATHOLOGY

Every formative movement in culture, if profound enough to begin
a new cycle of development, seems to start as a reaction against an
inner disruption of society — ^what Gilbert Murray called a ‘loss of
nerve.” Almost overnight the familiar life that people have lived be-
comes meaningless: though they go through the routines of the day,
inhabit the accustomed buildings, and worship their usual gods, their
whole life suddenly becomes hollow. In a going culture, even the trivial
details of existence become significant through their relation to the
whole. In a disintegrating one, even great ambitions and plans seem
insignificant, because a living sense of the whole has disappeared. At
that moment, speech becomes da-da: once dynamic leaders become
dangling puppets: life itself suddenly gets deflated, with an obscene
snort, like a toy balloon ripping on a nail.

Thenceforward a culture may for many centuries go on repeating
the old pattern of activities and ceremonies: it may even revert to
archaic modes in order to overcome the dismaying discovery that the
pattern is becoming dimmer as life itself proves emptier. But this
crisis may cause a decisive reaction. If the forces of life rally, a new
movement begins: the old ideas, de-polarized and freed from the pat-
tern that can no longer use them, become re-united around a new or-
ganizing idea: the farther the disintegration has gone, the wider is the
area on which the new idea can draw for sustenances While the process
of syncretism and synthesis can be traced with classic clearness in the
history of Christianity, it is more or less present in every great trans-
formation. When a civilization begins to develop around such an idea,
it is potentially saved: that is, the lost members of this society — ^lost
because they have been excluded from it or have found no common
goal — ^become re-united: supported by the new ideology, they devise

a new plot, wear a new costume, build new scenery, engage in a hew

216

the drama of renewal

217

drama. More often than not the excluded ones, the Gentiles, or the
barbarians, the proletariat, the despised minority, take the lead in
this transformation.

In this whole process there is a certain “optimism of pathology,’’
as physicians used to call it: that is, where conditions seem worst, as
in the delirious fever that precedes a crisis, they often have a higher
chance of becoming better. Only after a certain agony of disintegra-
tion has been experienced is the soul ready, it would seem, to take on
the otherwise insupportable burden of creating a new form of life. If
the social crisis does not bring about death, it may foster fresh growth,
in the way that a plant whose leaves have been stripped by beetles may,
even late in the season, put forth fresh leaves. Often the creative period
in a culture is the moment of rebound from a hard, almost fatal chal-
lenge: witness Athens after the Persian war, the Jews after the escape
from Egypt.

More than one encyclopedic philosopher of history in our time has
exerted much efEort to understand how and why a cycle of culture or
civilization develops, flourishes, and comes to an end. Spengler, using
the simplest but most deceptive of analogies, suggested that all cul-
tures went through the cycle of the seasons: forgetting that, if he took
his figure seriously, he would have to account for the possibility of
cultures situated in regions without any marked quarterly contrasts
between cold and heat, growth and dormancy. Toynbee, building on
Spengler, has gone exhaustively into various aspects of growth, arrest,
and disintegration, with far more concrete detail and a more generous
allowance for contradictions and discrepancies than Spengler. Unfor-
tunately, at the end, Toynbee comes forward, if I understand him, with
the suggestion that the mission of a culture in its final stages is to
produce such a state of collapse and torment and irremediable dis-
integration as to make people give up all hope of earthly fulfillment.
This leads to the development of a new type of Heaven-centered so-
ciety — inconceivable, it would seem, to the whole and healthy — di-
rected toward Eternity and functioning “out of time.” On Sorokin’s
interpretation cultures fluctuate between ideational and sensate types,
the first mystic, inward, otherworldly, the second pragmatic, external-
ized, positivist: a view which, despite the wealth of scholarship that
supports it, seems to combine the weakest features of Spengler and
Toynbee, though it tries to avoid the arrogant dogmatism of the first
and the anti-historical otherworldliness of the second.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Now there are crushed and splintered fragments of truth in all three
interpretations; and I would willingly utilize them: often the splinters
penetrate deep. My own interpretation, however, is based on the as-
sumption that man has repeatedly altered his archetypal biological
^plan of life by creating, through his culture, a social ritual and a
drama, formed by his own special needs and conforming to his own
emerging purposes. This new drama was, perhaps, a natural result
of the increasing division of labor; for with such division went a
multiplication of roles: choices thus opened before the members of
such a society, not given altogether in their ancestral patterns. Within
a developing society, fresh tensions arise and struggles ensue, between
the old static tribal selves and the new cast of characters. This dramatic
conflict heightens the interest of life: in search of it, men leave the
custom-bound village and go to the city, for the city, out of its variety
of human resources, provides a new mode of unity other than repeti-
tion and ritual: unity of dramatic theme. This theme is defined and
modified by recurrent collective choices.

Drama, taking form in the theater, constantly appears as a symbol
of a culture, at the moment the culture itself transforms stereotyped
routines into unexpected dramatic actions, rich with new possibilities
for life. For over the drama of the higher cultures presides a general
guiding theme, a plot that encompasses every part of society and that
involves each actor in a role other than his natural biological one, or
the fixed prescriptions of social ritual. Thus emerging and developing
social purposes get the better of habit and custom, tempting man into
efforts that call forth otherwise xmused stores of vital energies. In this
drama of a culture man takes a further step in the process of interpre-
tation that began with his utilization of the dream in art and his inven-
tion of language. By dramatic enactment, which encompasses his place,
work, and folk, the scene, the action, the lines, and the plot, man
interprets a larger range of phenomena than he could by any system
of limited observation: he takes it in not merely as spectator but as
participant: as playwright, manager, and scene-builder, too. This
multi-functional role, enclosing every aspect of life, yields a fuller
knowledge of the possibilities of existence, of man’s nature and destiny,
than could be achieved by any narrower m4ans; for it invokes the
widest kind of collaboration, and brings about the utilization of every
possible aptitude and function.

The conception of the plot and the building up of the main themes
of culture is one of the principal offices of religion. That which moves

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THE DRAMA OF REN|:WAL

men to dramatic action in roles other than their natural ones is in fact
their religion, no matter by what name they may call it. Thus the ac-
tive religion of the Romans was not the pious performances attached
to moth-eaten cults of local deities, but the construction of the Roman
imperium: that of the American pioneer was not Protestantism, but the-
conquest of nature and the winning of the frontier. It was for these
ideas that men struggled and sacrificed and willingly died. The de-
tailed working out of these dramas in successive scenes and actions lies
at the very heart of human history. What stands outside the collective
drama belongs to the lumber room of history or to the heating and
plumbing system of the theater: necessary incidents to producing the
drama, but with no specific reference to what takes place on the stage.
Who would go to the theater if all that happened was a series of scenic
changes and fresh lighting effects, staged for their own sake? Man is
easily bored by all the preparatory activities Nature forces on him:
his drama is precisely what makes life interesting to him.

The rise of civilizations, from this point of view, is associated with
the formulation of a dominant unifying theme and the creation of a
central role for the hero, with subordinate roles for the supporting cast.
But in the further development of the drama, more than this is re-
quired: the building of a special stage, the design of fresh scenery and
properties, which will providfe a symbolic background for the action,
the further elaboration of roles, so that every member of the com-
munity will have a significant part to play. Meanwhile, the action tends
to shift from the original central characters to the whole society that
supports them.

Naturally, the lines of this drama are unwritten: the play itself is
full of unplanned-for surprises, misplaced climaxes, prolix interludes,
disconcerting breaks in action, awkward passages from comedy to
tragedy: at best, it is a sort of commedia delV arte, in which the actors
improvise the lines as the plot progressively unfolds itself and, through
their own fresh interpretations, gathers point and significance. Every
culture produces a drama and is a drama : it interprets life and is life.
Threatened by regressions to man’s animal past, or by arrest in tribal
rituals, man escapes from these limitations through the invention of
drama, in which he renounces the perfection that animal societies
know, and the stability that tribal societies achieve, by enacting the
plot of the possible; choosing his costumes, his scenery, his lines, in
order to give new meanings and purposes to human life. In the drama

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

of a culture, man both holds the mirror up to nature and discovers po-
tential selves that would otherwise lie dormant and unformed.

This dramatic interpretation of human culture does not seek to re-
place other interpretations, the economic, the religious, the psycho-
•^logical, the geographic: its merit is that it includes them and exposes
the partiality of the effort to single out any aspect of the performance
as the sole significant one. And if this is in fact a clue to the develop-
ment of cultures, it is likewise perhaps a key to their decline. When a
culture begins to disintegrate it does so, not because the seasons have
changed, not because it is old and decrepit, not even because it has
met an external injury or shock, but because its guiding theme, which
bound all the parts of it together, political activities and economic
affairs — and art and philosophy, too — ^has become exhausted: the acts
of progressive self-revelation and self-understanding have been played
out to their appointed end. The operative cause, which touches every
institution simultaneously, is the collapse of meaning: the disintegra-
tion, not simply of this or that part, but of the overall pattern. As soon
as this happens, the old scenery becomes irrelevant; the stage becomes
cluttered with useless properties, which are themselves obstructive to
fresh action: no longer impelled by its plot, the culture lacks choices,
and even when presented with them, its leaders are incapable of mak-
ing fresh decisions.

So, what begins in the growth of civilizations with the quickening
of traditional ritual into a dramatic struggle, with challenges made
and accepted, with purposes carried out or frustrated, falls back into
a smooth, sordid-morbid routine. Yes: the old words have been spoken
once too often: the old gestures have become a compulsive tic: life be-
comes full of vain repetitions, and the tensions and the ambitions that
roused men to play their parts cease to be satisfactory even as ritual.
The essence of drama is action and struggle in an important role, work-
ing up to an undisclosed climax through choices freely made. When
the tension relaxes, the end itself disappears and the whole meaning
, of the performance evaporates. If the actors do not have the sense to
leave the stage when that moment comes, then a tedious epilogue will
be recited, just interesting enough, perhaps, to keep the audience from
dispersing: witness Egypt after 1200 B.c. or China after the Sung
Dynasty. At this point the actors, who had once thrown themselves
into their work, leaving their everyday selves to take on their higher
roles, refuse to take their parts seriously, particularly if the acting
demands some strain and effort. They are tempted either to clown it

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

221

or to fall back on their natural off-stage selves. This phase of vulgar
naturalism is the end of all the arts: not least the art of life.

Now historically this relapse into the ‘^natural self” is usually ac-
companied by an outbreak of rampant vitality: not the meaningful
vitality of culture, but the blank raw vitality of barbarism, the regres-
sive “barbarism of civilization,” as Vico called it. With this the forces*^
of the id, which had been held in restraint by the very requirements
of the drama, manifest themselves in an upsurge of untrammeled lust
and aggression, greed and senseless violence. Since men do nothing
without some form of ideological disguise, if not support, this de-
thronement of the super-ego, this debasement of the ego, this mag-
nification of the id, is accompanied by a deliberate cult of the primi-
tive and the infantile. At this moment, all the more mature and more
significant forms of life are dismissed, with contempt, as a mere hypo-
critical mask, an empty show. Effortlessness and purposelessness, the
positive denial of significance and order, become qualifications for
public success and approval: the chief reason for existence becomes
a denial of any reason for existence. Nausea, followed by vomiting,
not merely becomes almost a dominant symptom of the spiritual life,
but the vomit itself is prized as life’s essential product: the ultimate
reality in all its sour denial.

Short of this final rejection of life, in anything but a physiological
sense, each organ seeks its own separate satisfaction, as each member
of this disintegrating society seeks his own temporary safety and pros-
perity, or as much of it as he can “get away with.” If they still go
through the motions of work it is only to make possible their dissipa-
tions and distractions and debaucheries. Neither direction nor self-
control is left in such a society: its only form of inhibition or repres-
sion is that exercised against the higher functions. The plot of such a
society is an inverted drama: it begins with the murder of the hero and
successively mutilates, tortures, or exterminates every subordinate
character. Boasting his decapitation, modem man parades, like a
figure by Dali, in a blasted landscape, kicking his own head before
him. The raw id, like unscreened energy, is fatal to what is specifically
human: the new barbarian, with not even an animal’s life-plan to guide
him, must debase even his animal functions. So Hitler and his accom-
plices invented new mutilations of the human body in order to defile
the spirit more effectively. The very idea of hell, an eternity of torture,
was the subjective by-product of such a disintegrating society.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Emerson’s estimate, that one-half of man is expression, becomes
even truer if one realizes that this is mainly dramatic expression: in-
deed that his whole history is essentially a psychodrama, or rather a
series of such collective dramas. Man is never so fully himself as when
^e is acting a part: when he is transforming the raw materials of life
into art. Similarly, men are never such sorry creatures as when they
have reached the end of one drama and find themselves without any
part: each the undistinguished member of an aimless crowd of un-
employed people. In such a state, only one thing can save the lost in-
dividual or his society: a new drama. When they are unwilling to
throw themselves into this task they will seek a substitute in one-di-
mensional salvation: salvation by correct diet or by right posture or
by dream-analysis or by orgasms.

Western civilization has now plainly come to a point where all the
processes of disintegration and barbarism I have been abstractly de-
scribing are fully in view: the faceless and heartless man, the gangster,
the connoisseur of violence who has devaluated everything about life
except the instruments for defacing it, the inventors of the extermina-
tion camp, the agents and potential practitioners of random violence
who devise H-bombs and biological instruments of genocide: all these
are not merely in our midst but they include supposedly honorable and
intelligent members of our society: the final proof of our extreme de-
basement. The processes of negation they have set in motion threaten
to bring ruin to what is left of our civilization: carrying destruction
over wider areas, and hastening its pace more effectively than ever
before, precisely because we have placed all the highest capacities of
scientific abstraction at the disposal of moral imbeciles and psychotics.
In this manner the drama of the machine will come to an end: if it
goes a scene further, there will not even be corpses left on the stage.

But what has happened in history before, may happen again: after
disintegration, renewal. If that were not so it would be foolish to waste
one’s time considering alternatives to' the catastrophe that is already
so close to us. ^‘Each age is a dream that is dying and one that is com-
ing to birth”; and if the stench of a universal extermination camp now
hangs prospectively over the planet, the possibility of a new life-drama
has also appeared. We may not be spared the last act of disintegration:
handcuffed together, the Automaton and the Id may march to their
common doom. But already the script for a new play — or at least the
synopsis — ^has been written and the new scenery and props are already
in the wings. We have now, as a means of survival and a prelude to

the drama of renewal

223

our further development, to throw ourselves into a new drama, in which
elements of the human personality that have been repressed or mu-
tilated by older institutions will form the core of a new synthesis.

Against the domination of the machine, we shall restore fresh energy
to the word and the dream: we will bring forth ideal projects, plans.^
dramas, related to the whole personality, and to the community that
sustains it and enhances it. Whereas the mark of the machine age was
the dehumanization of man, the new age will give primacy to the per-
son, so that ethics and the humane arts will dominate politics and
technics. Many of these changes and transformations have long been in
process. Our present task is to identify the emergent elements and to
find a method, open to each of us, for bringing them together. In this
process, much that is merely new we must be ready to reject; and
much diat is old will still prove of service.

2: DOCTRINE OF THE WHOLE

If the present diagnosis is correct, modem civilization cannot be suf-
ficiently improved to escape disintegration by forms of science and
politics and religion that now actively prevail: in all these domains a
new orientation must be conceived, and more positive modes of action
provided. Out of the division of peoples and races, we must create
unity: out of the separation of classes and cultures, we must create
common goals that will unite them, without permitting any permanent
state of dominance and inferiority: out of intellectual specialization,
we must create synthesis; finally, by overcoming the long-maintained
hiatus between the subjective and the objective world, we must create
a new person, who is at one with nature, and a new concept of nature,
which does full justice to the person.

With the insights and the methods that are now in use, such a deep
organic transformation in every department of life is inconceivable,
except by slow piecemeal changes. Unfortunately, such changes, even
if they ultimately converged on the same goal, are too partial and too
slow to resolve the present world crisis. Western civilization needs
something more than a drastic rectification of private capitalism and
rapacious profiteering, as the socialists believe; something more than
the widespread creation of responsible representative governments, co-
operating in a world government, as World Federalists believe; some-
thing more than the systematic application of science to social affairs,
as many psychologists and sociologists believe; something more than

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

a re-building of faith and morals, as religious people of every creed
have long believed. Each of these changes might be helpful in itself;
but what is even more urgent, is that all changes should take place in
an organic inter-relationship. The field for transformation is not this
^^.or that particular institution, but our whole society: that is why only
a doctrine of the whole, which rests on the dynamic intervention of
the human person in every stage of the process, will be capable of di-
recting it.

On piecemeal terms, such a change is impossible: indeed incon-
ceivable: so those who know no other method of approach are, if they
be honest, corroded with cynicism and despair. But those who come
to our present disorders with such limited expectations of surmount-
ing them are like the pathetic armchair admirals in the United States
Navy in the early stages of our conflict with Japan: these individuals
predicted that the conquest of Japan would take at least ten years,
since they could conceive no other way of effecting it than by captur-
ing each island base, one by one, from the Caroline Islands upward.
As long, indeed, as we cling to the present piecemeal method of attack,
our problems will remain largely insoluble, unless we allow such a
span of time for their working out that the crisis we now face would be
unaffected.

But one of the reasons our society has become so incapable of con-
trolling the automatic processes it has set in motion, is that its most
potent and reliable method of thought has been basically at fault.
Primitive man mistakenly treats things as if they were persons: but
modern man treats persons as if they were things ; and that is perhaps
an even more dangerous superstition. The primitive’s habit of mind
at least did justice to the potentialities for life which matter, even in
its less organized forms, actually possesses. But the modern bias re-
duces higher functions to lower ones, misinterprets as external events
alone the processes of integration and development, and offers no clue
to the nature of an organic transformation, which pervades the whole
at the very moment that it brings about critical changes in the part.

Up to now, the closest that Western thinkers have come to a philoso-
phy of the whole, capable of doing justice to the nature of organisms,
societies, and human personalities, has been in the Marxian doctrine
of dialectical materialism: especially as that doctrine was expounded
by Friedrich Engels. What was important in this conception was cer-
tainly not Marx’s vulgar materialism: what was important was the
original Hegelian conception of the organic unity of natural and so-

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

225

cial processes, in their continuous evolution and transformation. This
unity underlies even conflicts between the dominant forces of society,
since each resolution of thesis and antithesis in turn produces a syn-
thesis which reconciles their claims in a new emergent pattern. What
success Marxism has actually had in the world has been partly due to
the confidence and resolution that the very idea of such a possibility^
of unity gives to the believer: in that respect it rivals Islam as a reli-
gious doctrine.

Unfortunately, in suppressing the Hegelian part of its heritage, with
its emphasis on subjective forces and ideas, Marxism gave rise to as
great a distortion as the non-organic, piecemeal view of the life-process
given by post-Newtonian science. In addition, the very conception of
the dialectic process itself is too limited to account for all types of
change: Marxism does not do justice to non-dialectic changes, like
maturation: it takes no account of the processes of de-building and
disintegration, which often fail to produce any reactive change in the
opposite direction: above all, it has no place for freedom, that essen-
tial attribute of personality: for Marx limited freedom, in so many
words, to ‘‘the conscious recognition of necessity.” Hence Marxism has
no theory to account for its own corruption, though the stench of that
corruption in Soviet Russia is the most signal manifestation of Marx-
ism today.

Even if one added Hegelian idealism to Marxian materialism to
form a theoretic whole, Marxism would be an inadequate doctrine;
for the reason that it makes the processes of history external to human
choice and plan, and buries the person in society. Instead of under-
standing that the person is a higher emergent from the community,
Marxism personifies the community and endows its leaders alone with
the true attributes of persons: this is in fact a regression to the theol-
ogy of the Egyptian pharaohs, for whose personal enhancement a
whole society worked and slaved. The tributes offered to Stalin on his
seventieth birthday did in fact endow him with every attribute of God-
head. Meanwhile dialectical materialism has been transformed in the
USSR into a system of totalitarian compulsion, in which the ruling
classes protect themselves from the challenge and struggle inherent
in the dialectic process itself by holding that they have arrived at per-
fect and ’final truth. This “truth” may of course change from year to
year as a matter of expediency; but the Stalinist Marxian denies the
validity of any rival form; despotic fiat takes the place here of co-
operative verification and correction.

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226

Far from creating dynamic unity and synthesis, this dialectical sys-
tem, despite Engels’s original effort to make it organic, creates a static
monolithic body of dogma: insulated from criticism and from the
challenge of rival ideas. Even worse, it creates a dualistic theology,
with a special God, ^'‘communism,” and a new devil, capitalism. This
"^theology becomes all the more quaint because communism has been
transformed, in the course of a generation, into a full-fledged fascist
system, marked by the absolute control of a single party, by compul-
sion and terror as normal adjuncts of government, by the abject wor-
ship of the Leader, and by a paranoid isolationism; whereas in almost
every country capitalism has been steadily modified by an influx of
socialist measures which equalize wealth, distribute power to the work-
ers, guarantee economic security, and promote human welfare: in short
provide many of the tangible benefits promised by communism with-
out abolishing political and intellectual freedom.

The time has come, therefore, for a more profound transformation
than the purely materialistic conceptions of revolution could envisage.
The present crisis calls for an axial change in our whole system of
thinking and in the social order based on it. Deliberately, I use the
word ‘‘axial” in a double sense, meaning first of all that there must
be a change in values, and further a change so central that all the
other activities that rotate around this axis will be affected by it. Such
a change must be based on a fuller understanding of human life, in all
its dimensions, than the naive philosophies of romanticism and social-
ism or any other form of eutopianism were able to entertain. The new
philosophy will treat every part of human experience, from the en-
during structure of the physical world to the briefest incarnation of
divinity, as an aspect of an inter-related and progressively integrating
whole. It will restore the normal hierarchy of the organic functions,
placing the part at the service of the whole, and the lower function at
the command of the higher: thus it will establish once more the primacy
of the person, and the function of man himself as the interpreter and
director — ^not the passive mirror and ultimate victim — of the forces
that have brought him into existence.

3: ON REACHING A SINGULAR POINT

So far the best insight into the creative factors in history comes from
an almost forgotten memoir by the great physicist, James Clerk Max-
well. In this letter, following up a mathematical clue first traced by

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

227

Babbage and Boole, he sets forth his doctrine of Singular Points, Clerk
Maxwell observed that science is organized to study continuities and
stabilities ; and selects by preference those fields where these attributes
are significantly dominant. But even in the physical world, he adds,
there are unpredictable moments when a small force may produce, not^^
a commensurate small result, but one of far greater magnitude . . .
‘‘the little spark which kindles the great forest, the little word which
sets the whole world a-fighting, the little scruple which prevents a man
from doing his will.”

“Every existence above a certain rank,” Maxwell continues, “has
singular points: the higher the rank, the more of them. At these points,
influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account
of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance. All
great results produced by human endeavour depend on taking advan-
tage of these singular states when they occur.” And Maxwell goes on
to quote Shakespeare’s famous passage from Julius Caesar about a
tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads on to for-
tune. At such moments that which is impossible on any common-sense
calculation, may not merely become thinkable but enactable; whereas
predictions based on regularities, continuities, stabilities, also observ-
able in the same society and usually sufficient for its description, would
prove misleading as a guide to decisive action or as a clue to future
tendencies. What informed Roman observer, as late as the second
century A.D., could have believed that his great empire would be taken
over, from top to bottom, by the followers of an obscure Galilean
prophet, hardly known by name to the educated?

'^at follows from this doctrine? As regards all that touches the
thousand routine functions of society, with its mass movements and
its mass organizations, Maxwell’s observation remains inoperative for
the greater part of their history: to keep even the meanest community
going from day to day calls for an enormous mass of repetitive ef-
fort, putting brakes on dangerous tendencies, speeding remedial ac-
tions, bringing about detailed reforms and improvements. The doc-
trine of Singular Points coimtenances no suspension of these daily
needs and fulfillments: no putting off of the numerous concrete tasks
needed to support the life of the community: no passive waiting around
for the great moment that will bring about some different constellation
of forces. Indeed, Maxwell’s doctrine presumes the existence of these
regularities and continuities.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

But Maxwell adds something both to the scientific description of
social change and the life of any society that may be so described.
For he points out that at intervals, at critical moments in crises, a sup-
plementary method of inciting change may be a decisive one, particu-
-^larly if its importance is recognized and the nature of the moment it-
self correctly interpreted. At such a pass, the human personality may
produce an effect out of all proportion to its physical powers, just as a
tiny seed-crystal, dropped into a saturate solution, may cause the whole
mass to assume a similar crystalline form. Such timely intervention of
a ‘‘physical magnitude too small to be taken account of by a finite be-
ing” may produce an effect equivalent to a cumulative and widespread
change accomplished by a much greater expenditure of effort through
the normal channels of social change.

This doctrine accounts for the major operations of personality in his-
tory: it likewise accounts for the rareness of these occasions. Even when
such a change is brought about, however, it must be confirmed and car-
ried through by the same forces that operate through institutional
mechanisms from day to day. (In terms of our sociological schema the
personal processes of formulation and incarnation must be followed
through by the social processes of incorporation and embodiment.)
In both cases, we are dealing with natural events, operating on the
plane of history: one proceeds by an accumulation of small changes:
the other by a singular change that irradiates through and transforms
the whole society.

Maxwell’s doctrine, now confiirmed by physical research, casts a
further light on the means by which a new type of personality, Con-
fucian, Buddhist, Christian, Mohammedan, Marxian, gathers to itself
suflScient power to overcome the normal resistances to wholesale change
that every society exhibits. At moments of crisis, where the roads to
disintegration or to development separate, as on a watershed, a single
decisive personality, or a small group of informed and purposeful
men, may by a slight push determine the direction and movement of an
otherwise uncontrollable mass of conflicting social forces. At such mo-
ments not a single institution or group, but a whole society, will be in-
volved in a change far beyond its ordinary capacities for adaptation:
yet the dynamic agent in this transformation, the “spark which kindles
the great forest,” will be the individual human person; for it is he
who precipitates the change in the social order by first initiating a
profound re-grouping of forces and ideal goals within himself. At such
a moment the human integer represents the whole and in turn has an

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229

effect on the whole. Only within the compass of the person can a total
change be effected within the span of a single generation, sufficient to
produce the necessary effect on civilization at large: like the seed-
crystal, he passes on to the whole the new order of the part.

The point to observe is that what science calls “nature” or the “ex-
ternal world” is partly a projection of the human personality, modified
by its capacities and its needs and its cultural forms. Instead of begin-
ning with nature and eliminating, as far as possible, the operations of
the personality, we must begin with the human personality, as the
most inclusive and complete of all observable phenomena, since every
other kind of force and event can be mirrored in it and interpreted
by it; and we must pay particular attention to those kinds of events
that are not patent in the more stable and repetitious cycles of nature.

In taking this position I would recall certain illuminating percep-
tions of William James, which unfortunately he never sufficiently de-
veloped in his own philosophy. “The spirit and principles of science,”
he observed, “are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them
that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in
which personal forces are the starting-points of new effects. The only
form of thing that we directly encounter, the only experience that we
concretely have, is our personal life. The only complete category of
our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements
of that. And this systematic denial on science’s part of personality as
a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, con-
ceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round prove to be the very de-
fect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted
science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look
perspectiveless and short.” (The Will to Believe.)

The whirligig of time has now gone round. On the ideological basis
of the person we must now make a fresh start.

Instead of the self-abdicating view of the post-medieval world, which
put external nature in a position of dominance, we now give primacy
to the historic person, with his values, purposes, ideals, ends. As soon
as we accept this interpretation as the only one that is capable of do-
ing justice to every aspect of human experience, uniting the inner and
the outer, the private and the public, as well as the subjective and the
objective, we have a firm hold upon the whole gamut of human ex-

230

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

perience; for, among other things, we can then give due weight to non-
repeatable events and to singular moments.

Much has happened even in science during the last half-century to
make this change possible. Not the least important observation of
^Freud’s was the discovery that single events — traumas or injuries —
that took place in earliest childhood, might leave traces on the human
personality that would outweigh in their effect a lifetime of habit.
Though Freud may originally have over-stressed the pervading in-
fluences of isolated injuries that occurred in childhood, there is little
doubt that such events, both in childhood and much later, may pro-
foundly re-shape the personality. Not only a trauma but a benign oc-
currence may have such a disproportionate effect — a sentence cas-
ually dropped by a teacher in the midst of a lesson, a single act of
heroism or generosity or sacrifice, may even without visibly standing
out in memory operate under the surface and determine a score of
later events.

Shall we neglect these occasions because science in the past had no
place for them in its limited method of interpretation? Shall we deny
their importance because they are quantitatively insignificant, or be-
cause they occur in a non-repeatable and unpredictable fashion? No:
for what holds true for the individual holds likewise for groups and
communities: in some measure the person operates at every level. Just
as we know that infinitesimal traces of chemicals, like copper or boron,
may be vital to organic growth, so mere traces of personality may alter
the pattern of historic events.

For the last four centuries man has disciplined himself to achieve a
view of the external world in which his own wishes and hopes and
fantasies should play as small a part as possible in coloring the re-
sults. In consequence of this displacement of the person, he has
achieved law and order, regularity and predictability, over large tracts
of external existence: a superb achievement, which redounds to the
benefit of the human person itself. But now, in order to give full weight
to every aspect of life and to restore parts of experience that were
suppressed in this effort to achieve order, man must complement this
gain in objectivity by creating a new form of subjectivity, one which
will not infringe in arbitrary fashion on scientific order, but will do
justice to forces and potentialities that still lie beyond it.

Not merely does it take a person to understand a person: but one
must use the categories of personality to understand a lower order of
life that has begun to partake of the personal. The release of these

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231

subjective factors may now even be a necessity of survival; for only
by a recovery of esthetic and moral sensitivity can we escape from
the maiming brutalities which a cult of the impersonal has imposed
as a matter of course.

In any generation, only a few people reach the stature which mak^.
them capable of dealing with the emergent forces and singular mo-
ments of history either as interpreters or actors: Burckhardt, Henry
Adams, Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes, showed such powers in recent
times on the theoretic side as Gandhi, Wilson, Lenin, and Churchill
did in action. If the process of de-personalization went on indefinitely
modern man would give up all possibility of directing and controlling
the lethal automatisms that have gone along with it. Even now, the
pervasive present sense of helplessness before a man-created catastro-
phe has caused many Western men to fall back to the superstitious
level of a primitive tribe in the face of a volcanic eruption: too awed
even to flee from the spot. Were Mr Roderick Seidenberg’s analysis of
this situation correct, there would be no way out.

So far from accepting that analysis, which projects our present life-
denying tendencies into an indefinite future, I look forward to a con-
trary reaction: one which will reclaim for the human personality much
of the ground that, during the last four centuries, it voluntarily sur-
rendered. Not neutrality and one-sided objectivity, not impersonality
and hardness, will be the marks of the new personality. Those traits,
once sedulously cultivated as “scientific,” are already in fact old-
fashioned: they perhaps reached their final limit of life-negation and
life-debasement in the Nazi extermination chambers where once repu-
table physicians, with high standing in science, subjected their vic-
tims to endless ingenuities of pseudo-scientific torture. The new per-
sonality will round out the discipline of the impersonal with the full-
est expression of sympathy and empathy, with the most exquisite re-
sponsiveness to all modes of being; with a readiness to embrace life
in its unity and wholeness, its uniqueness and its freedom and its end-
less creativity.

Far from certainly, yet very possibly, Western civilization may be
on the verge of such a crucial transformation today. A singular mo-
ment, which may hold incalculable practical consequences, may actu-
ally be at hand: perhaps, in some far comer of the world, it has al-
ready taken place, without being reported: for possibly not until long
after that moment has passed will we have the means of verifying its

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

existence — unless indeed the singular point should have a negative
issue, and lead us to final disaster.

But if we understand the nature of the personality, and the way
that it is operative in history — steadily in small increments, intermit-
t^^ntly in potent quantities — we shall be ready to take advantage of a
singular point when it occurs. There is even a special touch of encour-
agement in Maxwell’s dictum that the higher the rank of existence the
more frequent the occurrence of singular points.

There can be little doubt that mankind reached such a singular
point at the end of the Second World War. At that moment an awak-
ened personality in the presidency of the United States, with enough
courage and vision to have committed the country unconditionally to
the principle of responsible World Government, backed by even much
wider acts of succor and co-operation than unrra and the Marshall
Plan envisaged, might have led all mankind toward positive peace.
That effort would by its own inner dynamic have challenged and
overthrown the fascism and the frightened isolationism of the Krem-
lin. Such a point may presently occur again: sooner than any calcu-
lation of probabilities would expect. If we fail to take advantage of
that second moment, the rest of our voyage may in truth be “bound in
shallows and in miseries.”

4: AN ORGANIC SYNCRETISM

The ideas and the ideals that will transform our civilization, re-
storing initiative to persons and delivering us from the more lethal
operations of automatism, are already in existence: let me emphasize
this fact. Indeed the very persons who will make critical decisions,
when a singular moment presents itself, are already, it seems probable,
alive: it is even possible that a decisive change is already in operation,
though as thoroughly hidden to us as the future of Christianity was
to Pontius Pilate. If it were otherwise, the outlook would be black;
for no change as thoroughgoing as that which will start our civiliza-
tion on a new dramatic cycle can be effected overnight.

Just as the upbuilding and de-building forces are continually at
work in society, so many of the ideas and institutions necessary to
offset the now obsolete ambitions of “Faustian Man” have long been in
existence. For at least two centuries a series of new values and goals
have been projected in this society. Even though they have failed to
change markedly the course of events, they have served to correct

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

233

some of the distortions caused by a one-sided commitment to Moloch
and Mammon, the twin deities who would sacrifice life to power, pres-
tige, and profit.

Some of these compensating influences have come from su^wiving
traditions and customs, the debris of civilizations that were kinder to
the whole man: others represent new social mutations, hardly capable
of surviving in the existing order, but quite capable of becoming the
organizing nuclei in a new civilization. The coming together of these
ideas and ideals, their re-polarization around the concepts of the bal-
anced man, the self-governing group, and the universal community is
the first step in syncretism: the forerunner in the mind of a new gen-
eral pattern of life.

Let us make a brief canvass of the elements that were repressed by
the dominant culture of the past century: for they will probably domi-
nate the coming one, while the forces that have hitherto been upper-
most, mechanization and quantification, will be incorporated in the
new society as either recessives or survivals, not entirely lost or neg-
lected, we shall hope, but subordinated to more vital purposes.

From the eighteenth century on the chief challenge to the machine
came from romanticism, for by this time the medieval culture was in
a state of advanced decay, and the regenerative movement of Protes-
tantism had in its turn capitulated to capitalism. In protesting against
this erosion of traditional values, the romantics, led by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, sought to imdermine the whole mechanical conception of
human improvement: significantly Rousseau proclaimed in his first
dissertation that the arts and sciences themselves tended to corrupt
morals, as Augustine had held long before. Romanticism, seeking to
make a fresh start, returned with Vico and Rousseau to a mythical
primitivism.

In order to reinstate the suppressed vitalities of man, the romantics
turned their backs on culture and sought nature, unsullied, untouched:
Rousseau’s nature, not Newton’s. But what they called nature was in
fact the art and politics and morals of more simple societies: Corsica
served as well as Polynesia. They found their new ideals in the art
of the folk ballad, in the politics of the village community, in the
morals and the life-nurturing activities of the peasant household and
village, elegiacally recorded by Gray and Goldsmith, dynamically
espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Scott and their nineteenth century
followers.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Romanticism, thus conceived, was a return to the continuities of his-
tory, which had been disrupted by the new power ideology of despots
and centralized organizations; and it was conceived as a protest against
the utilitarian man, the new ideal type: it reinstated the elements in
Me that the mechanical ideology left out, spontaneity, impulse, free-
dom, love: practices that defied repetition and disrupted routine.

All in all, romanticism made many contributions to a more or-
ganic conception of human life. Everywhere it introduced an element
of playfulness and spontaneity into a civilization where the mechan-
ical discipline of capitalism was adding to the older constraints of
institutional formalism: it furthered a rustic simplicity in dress, a
peasant homeliness in cooking, an unaffected directness in manners,
and above all, a respect for the childlikeness of the child in education,
and for the lovingness of lovers in marriage. Even in the arts and
crafts, the romantic emphasis upon the person brought about a restora-
tion of sound handwork, at a time when the old methods and processes
were in danger of being cast completely aside. The Kindergarten and
the Garden Suburb were the supreme embodiments of romantic doc-
trine.

Unfortunately the romantics lacked a general principle of inte-
gration; for the romantic was so eager for freedom that he was at
home only in a despotic society of one. But the prophets of roman-
ticism, from Rousseau to Ruskin, from Herder to Hugo, from Scott
and Froebel to Walt Whitman and William Morris, brought back into
Western culture many important elements that had been jettisoned in
the swift change-over to the machine. Romanticism was an emotional
oasis in the desert of industrialism: by popularizing the picnic and
the summer vacation it altered the very rhythm of machine civiliza-
tion. Its more positive, non-reactionary ideals, the appreciation of
spontaneity it shares with Taoism, its emphasis on feeling and emo-
tion and sensibility, its respect for the organic, its affirmation of the
imaginative arts are all precious and permanent gifts to a balanced
culture.

One of the great contributions of the romantics was the attempt to
strip life to its essentials: this tendency only carried further an
afiiliated movement in the historic religions. Though one of the effects
of science was to close men’s minds to religion, another was to give
religion a compensatory role; and this led, like the romantic move-
ment itself, into an attempt to establish continuities with an older and
deeper past.

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL 235

This movement had first taken shape, in Christianity, in reaction
against thirteenth century capitalism; the first efforts of the Walden-
sians and the Lollards aimed at a de-materialization of the physical
symbols and rituals of the Church. This came to a climax in the com-
prehensive negations, the life-affirming denials, of the Society of.
Friends. Calvinism, at the same time, gave back to the congregation,'^
a group of persons, the initiative that had been lost through the one-
sided Caesarean organization of the universal Church; and the gen-
eral political concepts of democracy owe far more to the self-govern-
ing Churches, which flourished from the sixteenth century on in the
English-speaking countries, than to the once-democratic self-enclosed
guilds, which became centers of oligarchic corruption and decay. To
the Quakers we owe such democratic simplicity as we have achieved
in clothes, such directness of manners, such absence of empty cere-
monial, and such mildness and amity as we show in collective delib-
eration. This survival has still almost the vigor of a mutation: an
essential contribution to the new personality.

In other historic religions, similar movements have taken place:
notably in the purification of Hinduism undertaken by Mahatma
Gandhi. Gandhi’s translation of religious faith into a working po-
litical creed, based on the Tolstoyan principles of non-violence and
the duty of manual labor, were declarations of the primacy of the
person at the very point where modern man was tempted to minimize
the impact of personality, and to over-value that of organization. This,
too, will be one of the formative contributions to the new integration;
for without the capacity for direct action that Gandhi, above all other
leaders, showed, we shall be pinned to the ground like Gulliver in
Lilliput.

5 : EUTOPIANISM AND UNIVERSALISM

Along with the romantic and the religious sources of renewal comes
a third movement that must not be under-rated, for it now constitutes
an active recessive, if not a dominant, in most parts of Western civili-
zation. This one may call eutopianism: the belief in the possibility of
renovating society, through the application of reason and social inven-
tion to political and economic institutions.

The central themes of eutopianism were first expressed by Thomas
More in his Utopia ( 1516 ) ; and they cover every aspect of eutopian-
ism, from the constitutional reform of governments in order to equalize

236

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

power and further the democratic process, to the just sharing of the
annual productivity and the accumulated wealth of the community
by every willing and working member of it. In its faith in invention,
in its concentration on mass production — ^which means ultimately the
widest distribution of the product — even modern capitalism shows a
beneficent eutopian side: so that it was possible for a utilitarian mind
like Edward Bellamy’s in Looking Backward to look forward to the
attainment of Eutopia by a general election, which would alter the
control of industry without altering essentially either the process or the
product.

Now ours is a planet where the greater part of the population still
lacks the bare essentials of life: where even in the richest country
almost a third of the population, some fifty million, live below the
margin of physical decency, with ramshackle and overcrowded hous-
ing, a poor diet, insufficient medical care, and grossly inadequate op-
portunities for education and spiritual development. Hence it should
be plain that the eutopian movement, which emphasized the impor-
tance of many functions neglected not only by private capitalism but
by romanticism and religion, has still a vital part to perform in the
renewal of life. Those who dodge this fact, by confining renewal to
an inner change, as if the higher functions could flourish while the
lower ones were starved and mutilated, overlook the unusual nature
of their own security and comfort: we who have a more organic phi-
losophy cannot share such irresponsible, egoistic perfectionism.

So far from recoiling at communism, because of the current totali-
tarian perversion of its original life-furthering purposes, we must
clearly understand that every country, whether nominally agrarian or
capitalist or socialist, is bound, in support of a life more abundant,
to seek a progressive equalization of opportunities and goods for all
its members. De Tocqueville, a staunch conservative, correctly ob-
served a century ago that this movement toward equalization was the
guiding principle of the last seven hundred years in Western civiliza-
tion: it is in fact the essential democracy that underlies other possible
forms of democracy. Christianity recognized the fundamental equal-
ity of men in Heaven: eutopianism extends that recognition to the
earth. The program of socialism has still a considerable distance to
go, even in such advanced countries as Great Britain, Norway, or
Sweden, before each citizen will have by right his basic share in all
the goods of life, as preliminary to whatever else his special talents
or exertions may bring him. Admittedly, this movement is not free

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

237

from dangers: the dangers of totalitarianism, automatism, purposeless
materialism, psychological '‘over-protection.” By its unqualified suc-
cess it might create a universal squirrel cage, occupied by well-fed
squirrels, too fat and bored even to work the wheel that will ensure
their continued existence. But those dangers, though already pressin'^
in our over-organized technical society, will be diminished under an
ideology and mode of life that restores the primacy of the person.

Now the greatest of the repressed components in present civiliza-
tion I have left to the last: this is universalism. During the nineteenth
century universalism was expressed in forms that awakened antago-
nism and resistance in those parts of the world that most heavily felt
its presence. Religiously, universalism took hold in an increased
spread of Christian missionary enterprise, continuing a development
begun first by the Apostles and renewed once more by Francis of
Assisi in the thirteenth century. Politically, universalism expressed it-
self in the even more one-sided and arrogant form of imperialism:
the exploitation of distant lands and peoples for the benefit of investors
at home and a new class of colonial rulers abroad. Technically, uni-
versalism meant standardization and uniformity, first in the instru-
ments of production and finally in all the means of life: eventually in
the end-products as well.

Each of these forms of universalism had serious human defects:
above all a blindness to the values it suppressed and replaced and an
unwillingness to admit variety and autonomy. If the religious mission-
ary patronizingly gave without taking, the trader and colonizer rapa-
ciously took without giving: in the very act of spreading the real goods
of Western civilization, these representatives contrived to make even
its virtues odious. The age of exploration and colonization, of the
steamship and the ocean cable, laid solid foundations for a world
community: but it was content to erect on these foundations a flimsy
sheet-iron warehouse, a temporary structure to store raw materials be-
fore shipment home. Technical universalism provided the basic con-
ditions of peace, order, and co-operation, but for lack of insight into
the higher principles involved it presently became lost in the Heart
of Darkness — to recall Joseph Conrad’s deeply illuminating fable.

Despite these failures, universalism lies at the very center of a new
integration of life: the stone defaced by the nineteenth century build-
ers must now be recut with fresh and true surfaces. Perhaps the most
significant part of the development of science and technics during the
last three centuries has been its many universal by-products: a uni-

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

238

versal standard of weights and measures, a universal method, that of
scientific observation and experiment, and a universal principle of
association, based on freedom of thought and commimication, and
voluntary afiiliation under the forms of democracy. The development
^f international congresses of science and scholarship and religion
during the nineteenth century were the first steps toward a world par-
liament: at the great Paris Exposition of 1900, one hundred and
twenty International Congresses were held.

Meanwhile, the invention of improved mechanical methods of travel
and transportation and communication created, for the first time in
history, an all-embracing community. With the further development
in the twentieth century of the telephone and the radio — and ultimately
television — all the inhabitants of the planet could theoretically be
linked together for instantaneous communication as closely as the in-
habitants of a village. Indeed, it is conceivable — ^though not at all prob-
able — that the Sermon on the Mount could now be preached to the
greater part of mankind at the moment it was uttered, provided such
a notorious agitator as Jesus of Nazareth could be admitted to studios
controlled mainly in the interests of commercial advertisers or totali-
tarian governments, and allowed to speak without submitting a pre-
pared script.

So powerful were these universal agents up to 1914, so thoroughly
in accord were the peoples in the West as to their beneficence, that the
regressions that subsequently took place through war, nationalism,
and isolationism were for them almost unimaginable. But those who
believed in universalism were too little conscious of the arrogance and
one-sidedness that characterized its premature conquest of the planet:
the provinciality of its law and order, the failure of humility that
marked even those who professionally preached the gospel of humility.
What is worse, the technical and economic forms of universalism were
pushed much faster than the social habits that would have supported
a worldwide community: apart from spontaneous local efforts like
pidgin English, there was little serious effort to create a truly uni-
versal language for the practical tasks of world intercourse; a lan-
guage logical, fixed, and brief, like Basic English, but without the
unconscious provinciality of Messrs Ogden and Richards’s invention,
with their retention of English words and English sounds, even Eng-
lish spelling. Esperanto was only a shade better: it preserved the vices
of a natural language without achieving the grammatical simplicity of
Chinese or the facile euphony of Hawaiian. The lack of such a uni-

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

239

versal language, in an age that has the technical means of broadcasting
by short wave from any one spot to any other part of the earth, re-
duces the efficiency of our powerful machines to a mere fraction of
their possible maximum. This deep inner contradiction runs through
all our universal mechanical instruments: and the only thing more
strange than the fact that it exists is the further fact that so few people
seem aware of its absurdity.

What is true in technics holds equally for politics. Though at the
end of the nineteenth century a first feeble start at creating a body of
world law and a government capable of framing it and executing it
was made in the Hague Conference, imperialism and nationalism
moved in the opposite direction: toward war and conquest: toward
segregation, non-co-operation, isolation. This general political regres-
sion reached its climax in the economic autarchy actively practiced
by Nazi Germany and the New Deal in the United States in the nine-
teen-thirties, and in the segregation and isolation now hideously vis-
ible in both Soviet Russia and the South Africa of today. By contrast,
the old-fashioned imperialism of the nineteenth century was enlight-
ened and humane in a high degree: for it is more human to exploit
one’s brother than to deny that he has any claim on one’s attention.
The failure to create a world government, capable of establishing or-
der and law, to take the place of force and fear in the relations of
peoples, brought to an end the spontaneous universalism of the nine-
teenth century. The War that began in 1914 is therefore, in conse-
quence, not yet ended.

The naive form of universalism, as expressed by science and tech-
nics, no less than by missionary enterprise and imperialism, was itself
a partial movement. Technical universalism needed the correction of
eutopianism: a positive concept of justice and mutual aid, to take the
place of the “white man’s burden,” and an open-minded receptivity
to the products of other forms of culture, as they seeped into other
parts of the world, through the efforts of traders and scholars, ex-
plorers and scientists. Even within the domain of technics, universal-
ism too easily forgot its debt to other forms of life than its own: the
fact, for example, that perhaps half of the world’s food crops today
derive from primitive cultures that had no contact with the West dur-
ing their great period of plant domestication. Without these crops the
world would be closer to starvation; without ihe Amazon aborigine’s
gift of rubber, half our wheels would cease to move.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

The abortive universalism of the nineteenth century was neverthe-
less a happy beginning: the task of the coming age will be to provide
it with the human elements it lacked the insight to discover or the
courage to invent: a universal morality, as a basis of friendly political
intercourse: a universal language, taught as the second language to
all children in all schools, to make world communication possible: a
world government, with a world capital in every continent, transmut-
ing national struggles and conflicts, which will continue in some form
to exist, into habits of law and order, of restraint and positive co-op-
eration: a world citizenship for every human being on the planet, with
increasing energy and time devoted to travel and intercourse on a
world scale, and interchange of workers and students between regions
now ingrown, suspicious, and hostile through their isolationism. To
supplement a universalism based on mere mechanical uniformity and
on a breaking down of physical barriers in time and space, we must
create a universalism based on the spiritual wealth and variety of
men: their unity in diversity achieved by working together for com-
mon ends. Out of that may come, in the fullness of time, a truly uni-
versal religion.

Through this worldwide unity, the human personality, now sup-
pressed and deformed by the very agents and organizations it has cre-
ated, will begin to unfold and expand in all its dimensions: mankind
will enter upon a higher stage of development. This is the new heaven
and the new earth that beckon us beyond the disorders of our apoca-
lyptic age. But only whole men, liberated from the automatism of
both instinctual and rational organizations, integrated in all their
functions, will have the vital energy to take part in this drama. By
building the foundations for such a structure, our generation will in-
vest the work of the next era with purpose and significance.

6 ; THE mW MVTATION

The re-polarization of the existing creeds and ideologies and
methodologies, which now function at cross-purposes, could take place
only under one condition: through the appearance of a new concept
of space and time, of cosmic evolution and human development.

Such a mutation of ideas has in fact been taking place during the
last century: particularly during the last generation. One associates
this dominating concept with the new insights into the nature of the
organism and of the ecological processes in biology: with the explora-

THE DRAMA OF RENEWAL

241

tion of the pre-rational and unconscious and self-determined elements
in human behavior, which makes it possible to include art and reli-
gion in our total understanding of the nature and destiny of man. Fi-
nally, one associates the new concept with the emergence of a sociology
and a philosophy capable of doing justice to every aspect of humar^
life, the inner and the outer, the individuated and the associated, the
symbolic and the practical; that understands both repetitive processes
and singular moments, causal sequences and purposeful goals.

Now the new polarizing element is the concept of the person: the
last term in the development of the organic world and the human com-
munity. Instead of taking as fundamental such a derivative concept as
the physical universe, our thought now begins with the agent through
whose history and development such a concept becomes possible. In
other words, we begin with man himself, at the fullest point of his
own development, his emergence into a person: with man as the inter-
preter of natural events, man as the conservator of meanings and
values and patterns of life, with man as the transformer of nature,
and with man, finally, as the projector and planner of new purposes,
new destinies, not given in nature, man transcending his own creature-
liness in his forecasts of further creativity. Even in the physical cos-
mos, considered by itself, the new astronomers and physicists tell us,
creation may be a continuous process, perhaps the primordial one,
while what we once regarded as the ‘Veal” world, with its stabilities
and regularities, may be only a relatively inert residue — ^the detritus of
this creative process.

At all events, only when we begin with the person can we fill out
the blank spaces in our understanding left by the purely causal inter-
pretations of science. Causal explanation endeavors to understand the
complex by means of the simple; breaks up the whole to deal with
the part; treats all Events as determined sequences, as they in fact are
— once they have taken place. Teleological explanation seeks to under-
stand processes in terms of goals, the. thread in terms of the pattern,
the part by its dynamic relation to the whole. So, too, it interprets the
past with reference to the future, the necessary in relation to the pos-
sible, the actual as revealed in the potential. From this new standpoint,
we realize that facts are no more primary than values, that mechanical
order is no more fundamental than pattern and purpose, and that we
have not fully understood the cosmos until we have explored all the
dimensions — ^visible and hidden, actual and potential — of the person.

Man’s world, as we now conceive it, is a multi-dimensional one, both

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

in time and space. To take full account of it, we must include both
its subjective and objective aspects: not casting aside qualities or pat-
terns ©r purposes because they are irrelevant when we wish to measure
the speed of a falling stone or the motion of a planet. Into the person,
fthe mechanical, the organic, the social all enter: from the person,
creativity and divinity emerge. To interpret the whole, we must ap-
proach experience at various levels of abstraction and concretion; only
by so doing can we even partly grasp its dense, inter-woven, many-
layered complexity. Even in the physical sciences, from which so many
essential attributes of organic life are eliminated, there is a molar
aspect and a molecular one, an astronomic field and an atomic field:
and between these extremes there are many levels of experience and
consistent interpretation. When we begin with the person, which in-
cludes even the most elementary physical phenomena, we penetrate
life at every level, and reject nothing that is given in human experi-
ence, even if it appears but once.

With this new orientation man now resumes the place that he vol-
untarily abdicated three centuries ago, when Western man overlooked
his own creative properties and gave precedence to matter, motion,
quantitative change. The order and continuity man finds in nature, he
takes to himself, in order to further his own development. Likewise
the variety and adventure, the creativeness and expressiveness he finds
in himself, he reads back into nature, with new insights into events
that remained meaningless when taken in isolation, cut off from their
final destination. Through the new sense of the organic and the per-
sonal come the auxiliary notions of dynamic equilibrium and creative
emergence. There is no phase of knowledge or practical activity that
will not be affected by this re-establishment of the primacy of the
person.

Such a polarizing idea, when it takes hold in a society, plays the
part of the ^‘organizer” in cell growth: it provides the spatial pattern
and the temporal order through which every activity becomes inter-
related in a new design. The idea of a physical world from which
many of the higher operations of personality were excluded, which
was the very basis of the scientific and industrial civilization of the
past, was such a polarizer: the progressive dehumanization and anni-
hilation of man in his conquest of the planet and his exploitation of
power, was partly the result of this limited concept. In so far as the
idea of the person does fuller justice to the order of nature and the
condition of man, it may in the days to come offset the errors of the

the drama of renewal

24iJ

past and lay the basis for a worldwide integration of both thought and
life. Our machines have become gigantic, powerful, self-operating,
inimical to truly human standards and purposes: our men, devitalized
by this very process, are now dwarfed, paralyzed, impotent. Only by
restoring primacy to the person — ^and to the experiences and disci-
plines that go into the making of persons — can that fatal imbalance"'
be overcome.

The new formulations of organism, community, and personality are
now increasingly operative in many departments of life: in medicine
and psychological guidance and education, in community develop-
ment and regional planning, not least in technics, where an under-
standing of organisms has enabled the inventor to pass from the lim-
ited world of pure mechanics to that of organically conditioned mech-
anisms, such as the electronic calculating apparatus. In human beings
a dynamic balance is the condition of health, poise, sanity; and faith
in the creative processes, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values
and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the
pre-condition of all further growth.

CHAPTER IX.

THE WAY AND THE LIFE

1: PREPARATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

'‘^Know thyself,” the motto written over the Temple at Delphi, is
one of the most tantalizing admonitions that has ever been addressed
to man. For there is no part of the world that seems as accessible as
one’s self; yet that very intimacy has long prevented knowledge of any
kind from being achieved without the most strenuous and exacting dis-
cipline. For at the very gateway of such knowledge one discovers an
obstacle equally intimate: self-love, a protective pride that not merely
maintains one’s proper self-respect but covers smoothly all one’s weak-
nesses. To correct that blind spot one must first realize how large a
patch of the world it hides. To shape a new self one must first know
the properties of the raw material one must make over.

In the past there has been a succession of masters of self-knowledge
whose efforts to come to terms with themselves are still precious to
those who would follow their trail. One of the first of the great seekers
was Socrates, the Socrates Plato has set before us. His first concern
was to divest the self of an unjustified sense of security in the knowl-
edge it possessed, beginning with the verbal terms it used to express
that knowledge. If, as Socrates taught, men act on their knowledge,
and act badly either through ignorance or through false knowledge,
the way of right living seems plain: for no small part of our defects
of character, our lapses into sin and crime, could then be traced to
the meretricious unexamined premises upon which our actions are
based.

From Socrates’ standpoint, the evil we commit is fundamentally the
result of our defective thinking, or at least our failure to use fully the
processes of logic and dialectic in examining the course of our ac-
tions: we fail to identify or define rigorously the terms we use, like
justice, love, power, and knowledge itself; and all our choices are

therefore befouled and obscured. TTaere is a fragment of truth in this

244

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THE WAY AND THE LIFE

criticism: the truth that discloses itself particularly to a society that
is passing beyond the stage of custom, and needs some more intelligent
and intelligible guide to action than the assurance that ‘‘it has always
been done.”

Yet with all of Socrates’ patient examination and self-exposure, I
cannot recall any point in the Dialogues in which he examines his own
conduct in relation to his wife, Xantippe, in order to find out why she
had, in fact, turned out to be such a shrewish bad-tempered woman.
The answer might have told as much about Socrates as about Xantippe.
Had Socrates inspected his own behavior, he might have discovered
that love of knowledge in itself does not automatically produce vir-
tue: that there is a tendency in all people, including Socrates, to reject
as irrelevant, indeed, as non-existent, those forms of self-knowledge
that would lame their pride. None of the classic schools of philosophy,
in fact, made this discovery: they dreamed that reason could make
men lead perfect lives, and often had the illusion that this or the other
philosopher was in fact leading such a life. That insidious pride had
first to be broken down, before even the wisest soul could come close
to himself.

The reason for Socrates’ failure was discovered by another great
explorer of the soul, Paul of Tarsus. More rigorous in his inquisition,
Paul discovered that the self, however much it might seem guided by
intelligence, did not act on purely rational premises nor seek unde-
viatingly what knowledge established as good: Paul observed that the
good he supposedly sought he denied by his actions, and that the evil
he consciously rejected, he did. In short, human conduct is laden with
ambiguities because the order and purpose and knowledge man de-
veloped in his post-animal career must contend not merely with ani-
mal impulses that are now far more unsure and disruptive than they
ever were at the animal level, but also with perversities that knowl-
edge itself brings: insolence, a failure to reckon with one’s creature-
liness, over-confidence in the intellect itself. Knowledge is not enough:
to achieve self-knowledge one must become as a little child again:
breaking down the fences of class and caste and role, including the
fence that encloses a philosopher, and discarding the garments of pride
that conceal spiritual sores or deformities. The notion that a more
rational education will cure all the ills of society, if we start early
enough, fails to reckon with this fact: hence the weakness of every
program, from that of Robert Owen to that of John Dewey, which
over-weights the operations of intelligence alone.

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246

Actually, the rationalist analysis of the self fails in both directions:
if it refrains from plumbing the lower depths, the processes largely
insulated against reason and positive knowledge, it also falls short of
assessing the heights that are possible, by reason of propulsive ener-
gies also drawn largely from the unconscious, in the very teeth of
cold-blooded reason: energies that give rise to a self that transcends
its ordinary limitations, in acts of sacrifice or creative insight. Out of
the same obscure recesses of the self, where the demonic, degrading
elements lurk, angels and ministers of grace come forth, making pos-
sible liberating flights far above the pedestrian levels of conscious
knowledge, although the trudging intelligence will eventually perhaps
reach the same heights by slower means. In short, the self holds both
a hell and a heaven that rationalism, too confident of the powers of
reason alone, never penetrates.

In the great period of detachment from the folkways of the Middle
Ages, when the conventional corporate self, fostered by the Church and
the guild, no longer was competent to meet life on its new terms, two
great masters of self-knowledge appeared: Shakespeare and Ignatius
Loyola: incomparable psychologists both. Loyola knew better than
most saints the perversions of the self brought about through a too
wholesale commitment to virtue: he realized better than St Paul that
contempt for the law of the body might bring about ailments of the
soul quite as serious as those produced by letting the body have the
upper hand.

Long before Loyola, Plato had realized, indeed, that no amount of
self-analysis can sustain one in virtuous conduct unless one brings
about constitutional changes in the social order, and provides the, kind
of education and political institutions that are, in themselves, con-
ducive to human development. Brought up in the medicine of the Hip-
pocratic school Plato realized, too, that the spirit was transformed by
food and gymnastic and medicine: in other words that the self could
not be detached, even in the pursuit of its highest ends, from the ele-
mentary organic conditions that govern human existence: it was part
of a greater whole.

Loyola accepted this conception of the self and went further: he
knew that time and place and circumstance likewise alter the self:
hence one can know the self in its full dimensions only by participat-
ing in its drama and applying to it, at every moment, a vigilant disci-
pline. Loyola was perhaps the first psychologist to do full justice to
all the dimensions of the self: to combine in a single discipline the

the way and the life 247

Socratic, the Hippocratic, and the Pauline observations on the nature
of man. The failure of secular education to understand the nature and
value of his Spiritual Exercises, and to adapt them to the science and
culture of our own day, is a witness of the superficiality of both' psy-
chology and education during the last three centuries.* The recasting
of these exercises will, perhaps, be one of the signs of our capacity
to transcend the automatisms of both archaic tradition and current
civilization.

Fortunately, more powerful aids to the study of the self have come
into existence: they make possible new disciplines and new directions.
Consider briefly two such forms of analysis, one directed inward, the
other outward: Dr Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the dream and Mat-
thias Alexander’s analysis of posture. I put these two contrasting
methods of examination and diagnosis side by side, not because Alex-
ander’s work is comparable with Freud’s in significance, but because
they thus emphasize an important point about the organic knowledge
of the self: namely, that one can approach self-knowledge from either
the outside or the inside, by way of the body or by way of tlie mind,
and provided that one pushes far enough one will find the unrepre-
sented portions reappearing in the full description.

Alexander’s approach to the self begins with the human body as the
outward manifestation of every inward tendency. He himself was cut
short in his chosen career as an elocutionist by his developing a per-
sistent harshness of voice. By careful mirror-analysis of his method
of speaking, he discovered that his habits of holding his head, de-
pressing his diaphragm, and constricting his larynx were responsible
for the final symptoms in his vocal cords. By consciously altering the
relation of the head to the spinal column he corrected his ailment; and
his success with himself led to similar efforts at diagnosis and correc-
tion in others. Since we have abundant evidence to show that in many
cases psychological interpretation has removed physical symptoms
there is no reason to doubt that the reverse method of approach, cor-
recting the psyche J)y means of studied bodily readjustments, may be
equally effective.

To become conscious of how one stands, how one walks or stoops
or sits, may disclose inner tensions and contractions: the first move
toward their conscious release. Such revelations may be just as hard

* In 1944, in a class on the Nature of Personality at Stanford University, I made
an experimental approach to this problem; but my withdrawal from university
duties brought this prematurely to an end.

248

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

to accept as the grimmest pictures of distorted impulses the psycho-
analyst exposes; for eventually one must face, not just the outer symp-
tom hut the inner source.

Freud approached the self by a more devious inner route. By means
of his analysis of dreams Freud and his followers reached areas of the
self that had been neglected in more rational methods of analysis:
the most primitive impulses, the most infantile memories and practices,
the most deeply covered-over scars, disclosed themselves under the
symbolism of the dream and threw light on large active areas of the
personality that displayed themselves in daily life. The existence qf
tliis primeval layer of the self, the id, the unmodified, unsocialized
‘“^it,” partly accounted for botli the irrational and the pre-rational char-
acteristics of the person: it was, as it were, a dungeon in which the
discarded selves of the race lived on, claiming much of the food and
drink that might have nourished the inhabitants of the castle above.

Those accustomed to the hygienic practices of the nineteenth cen-
tury, sure that men were moved by pleasure and pain, or by enlight-
ened self-interest, found it hard to accept the existence of these age-
old prisoners of the unconscious, who sometimes made sudden raids
into the upper floors, to rape or slay the inhabitants, only to scramble
back again, cowed and cringing before the authority of the ego, to
rattle their chains or to fill the night air with obscene curses.

Whitman, picturing himself as stuccoed over with beasts and rep-
tiles, had anticipated this discovery in his Song of Myself: but Freud
spelled it out in dream after dream. Fantasy and dream, hitherto dis-
carded by the more rational approaches to self-understanding, threw
a new light, not merely on the waking moments of the individual, but
on the whole collective development of the race. One had to reckon
with the forces of the id if one were* to do justice to the aspirations of
the super-ego: the dark prisoners themselves needed, not the chains
and straitjacket, but sympathetic understanding and guidance: large
areas of the primitive, to change the figure, could be redeemed, once
one took possession of this unknown country, as the jungle itself has
been turned into plowland: “Where id was,” as Freud himself put it,
“there shall ego be”; and one may add, to correct Freud’s hostility to
the super-ego, where ego is there super-ego shall be.

The organic pictui'e of the self that is now available, when one puts
together the data of physiology and psychology and sociology, has the
dimensions of both depth and extension that were hitlierto lacking. If
die id unites man with his animal ancestors, the super-ego unites him

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249

with his historic social heritage, that is, with the super-organic and
ideal worlds he possesses in partnership with other men. Despite
Freud’s rejection of organized religion, he re-discovered the doctrine
of original sin in his theory of the Oedipus complex; and he fe-in-
stated, in modern terms, the therapeutic practices of the Christian
confessional.

Unfortunately Freud made the mistake of letting absolution follow
unconditionally from the confession itself and refused to take on the
priestly role of guidance. This meant that he and his followers pro-
jected their own unexamined set of values and devaluations upon their
patients, under the guise of scientific neutrality. But the practical gifts
of analytical psychology, which derive unmistakably from Freud’s
genius, outweigh its ideological defects.

On the basis of the essential knowledge first revealed by Freud,
various short-cuts to the examination of the self have now been effected.
One of the most notable of these is the extremely sensitive form of
psychodiagnostics, devised by Rorschach and perfected by his fol-
lowers: a method that reveals, as even the elaborate Freudian analysis
does not, the bodily as well as the intellectual and emotional com-
ponents of the self. This method of analysis is almost comparable to
the invention of scale maps for the description and further exploration
of the terrestrial globe: it not merely enables the observer to chart
familiar territory more accurately, but it brings into view undiscovered
land in related areas.

The success of the Rorschach ink-blot interpretation is due to the
fact that at every moment in his life the person is projecting himself
and transforming every part of the world he sees and touches, leaving
some trace of his personality on all that he does, recording his frus-
trations if not his controls and expressions. There will doubtless be
further refinements on the Rorschach method: the Murray-Morgan
Thematic Apperception Tests bring out other areas of the personality,
often indicating more fully immediate stresses and strains. In addi-
tion, the projectives techniques may be applied further, not in a static
record, but in a dynamic interaction, as J. L. Moreno has demonstrated
in the psychodrama, in an effort to combine insight with guidance and
positive therapy, in a series of dramatic scenes, enacted by the subject.

Each of these methods is a kind of mirror; and the best method, I
have no doubt, will be a combination of many mirrors, which will re-
veal the self from every side: both the partly visible self, as photo-
graphed and diagnosed by constitutional psychologists like Sheldon,

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250

and the partly invisible self, as revealed in the Rorschach blot or the
psychodrama. One may even look forward to a time when it will be
as commonplace to possess such an objective psychological picture of
oneself with all its wealth of inner detail as to have a snapshot. That
will be an important instrument of self-direction and self-education;
though it will require guides and interpreters of a higher order than
have yet appeared.

^ We may begin with the process of self-knowledge at any level: with
the discriminating assessment of sin (Loyola), with an analysis of
speech habits and meanings (Korzybski), with an interpretation of
dreams (Freud) or ink blots (Rorschach) or pictures (Murray-Mor-
gan) : with an examination of posture (Alexander) or a participation
in a psychodrama (Moreno): with a comparative study of civiliza-
tions (Toynbee, Kroeber, and Sorokin) or a comparative study of
primitive cultures (Malinowski and Mead).

Any one of these methods, if treated organically and carried far
enough, must in time foreshadow and embrace the findings in every
other department; since even the masks of the self are part of the in-
dividual and the collective act that it puts on: episodes in the larger
drama of a culture. Only those who have achieved self-knowledge and
are constantly seeking both to enlarge it and apply it in their daily
living, are capable of overcoming their automatic reactions and reach-
ing their own ideal limits. Hence the achievement of this wider knowl-
edge is an essential basis for ethical development: indeed the basis of
any sound education. In future, the school that neglects to provide
teaching and guidance in these departments will be recognized as even
more deeply defective than one that neglects to teach reading and
writing.

But note: there are certain aspects of the human personality that
no present system of diagnostic completely embraces, and no future
one in all probability will be able to encompass. For the self is no
fixed entity: an essential part of it is revealed only in action through
time; and except in those parts of the personality that have been defi-
nitely crippled, it is impossible to expose every human limitation or
potentiality before time has ripened it. In physical illnesses, patients
not seldom recover from diseases eminent doctors have pronounced
incurable or fatal; and similar mistakes will doubtless be disclosed
in reading human character, even after psychologists have made a
sufficient sample of ‘^normal” personalities to discover how many such
people have case histories almost identical with those who have sue-

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251

cumbed to grave mental disorders. Those who wish to qualify as
guides, must do so under the constant discipline of humility — on
guard against the cockiness that scientific knowledge, by reason of its
very triumphs, promotes.

The effect of self-inquisition should enable one to understand one-
self and to do justice to oneself: that is, to correct one’s blind drives,
to overcome one’s partialities and unconscious distortions, to estab-
lish a dynamic equilibrium, to release the latent potentialities which
either outside pressures or failures of insight have kept in check. Self-
knowledge is essential to the cultivation of that kind of humility out
of which effective co-operation and mutual aid are bom: it is the anti-
dote to self-righteousness, to excessive self-esteem, to arrogant self-
assertion.

All this is true for both the individual and the collective self. So
the American who understands the historic errors made by our fore-
bears in displacing the Indian and enslaving the Negro cannot, with-
out also a chastening self-correction, condemn the masters of Russia
for liquidating the bourgeoisie and enslaving the opponents of its
regime so ruthlessly: but by the same token, a Russian who understood
that his government deliberately committed against economic classes
and rival systems of thought crimes of the same order that other na-
tions have committed against races, would realize how lacking in es-
sential humanity and justice his method of installing a new social sys-
tem has been.

Without an adequate self-knowledge, without searching exposure,
without a consequent positive effort toward self-transformation in per-
son and group, the forces that now threaten to barbarize or exterminate
mankind can hardly be overcome. Such knowledge alone can save us
from the paralysis of complacent routine, and provide sufficient stim-
ulus to unearth the hidden or unrealized potentials of life — for each
of us is but an embryo of the self that may one day be brought to
birth. Thus the Socratic injunction, Know yourself, the Aristotelian ,
injunction, Realize yourself, the Christian injunction, Repent and re-
new yourself, the Buddhist injunction, Renounce yourself, and the
Humanist injunction, Perfect yourself are each and all partial but
essential recognitions of the fact that the final goal of human effort
is man’s self-transformation. All our ceaseless daily efforts to carry]
forward civilization will fail, unless we re-inslate this human goal:
for it is toward the making of persons that all these preliminary ac-
tivities tend.

252

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

2 : THE INNER EYE AND VOICE

Each one of us is like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus: at
any moment we may be struck by a blinding light and hear a voice,
"^'a voice that will tell us what we already know: that much bf our pres-
ent life is actually hateful to us, that many of the impulses we have
suppressed and reviled, in order to conform to the fossilized or decay-
ing institutions of our time, are precisely those impulses that should
be respectfully heeded and obeyed. We know that the destination of
this society, unless it changes its mind, is death: the death of purpose-
less materialism and sophisticated barbarism, or the more insidious
death of ^‘post-historic man,’’ the simulated life of automatons, oper-
ating in a collective process that has passed out of human control.
And just as for the early Christians the gods of classic civilization be-
came the demons of the emerging one, so for us, the dominant pseudo-
progressive elements in our present society constitute our danger,
while the suppressed impulses, weak and shadowy though they now
seem, the dreams of love and brotherhood, the will to create a uni-
versal society of friends, alone hold promise of salvation.

When that light strikes us we may still, in all humility, falter: it is
easier to acknowledge a new truth than to find a method for fulfilling
it. So the question for each of us is how he will take hold of himself:
not merely what he will think, but how he will act and what he will
do, in order to bring about in himself, at least partly, the changes that
will finally transform society and make possible new forms of life.
Before a new structure can be built, we must first clear the ground for
it: this means that we must throw off much of the burdensome appa-
ratus of our present life: we must break the prevailing images, aban-
don the glib routines and empty ceremonies: challenge the existing
ideological archetypes, and return, as near as possible, to the naked
person: alone with his cosmic over-self.

In this field, each of us is a learner and a novice: so let me drop
for a moment into an I-and-Thou relation with the reader, to empha-
size the fact that every suggestion I put before him is meant as much
for myself as for him.

The first step, then, is withdrawal and rejection, a course that may
bring poverty^ hardship, sacrifice; certainly it demands a readiness to
accept insecurity — ^though security naturally has become the obsession
of our disintegrating culture. Those who seek to take part in this trans-

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253

formation, even if their rejection does not take the heroic form shown
by a Thoreau or a Peguy, a Van Gogh or a Schweitzer or a Gandhi,
will still have to devise disciplines and exercises that will confirm their
detachment from the prevalent customs and restore initiative, once
more, to the human •soul. From my own experience I can testify that
this is hard counsel: the world is too much with us and too easily we ®
lay waste our powers.

Do not be unduly alarmed: withdrawal makes no public demands.
In large part, it will consist of little undramatic acts, hardly visible
even to your closest associates, concealed perhaps from your wife or
your husband or your bosom friend: indeed, it will he hard at first to
convince yourself that anything so quiet, so modest in dimensions, so
unpublicizable, could help bring about a profound change. Yet this
very chastity and insignificance is perhaps what indicates it to be a
major break, entirely out of the style of our existing society. Epi-
curus’s injunction, Hide yourself, is the first move toward having an
inner life: something that will ultimately be worth showing.

The first impulse of many people, when they perceive the need for
a social change, is to sign a pledge, to fill out a blank, to enter a sub-
scription, to join a party: thus they become visibly a member of a
group that will perform what the individual seeks to avoid doing by
himself, or even doing at all. The hundreds of organizations and asso-
ciations that function in a big metropolis bear witness to this impulse:
in large numbers they are merely mechanisms of vicarious atonement,
for actions unperformed. What I suggest here, as a first step toward
integration, is just the opposite of this: withdrawal from extraneous
activities, as the first step toward conscious, directed, passionate com-
mitment and participation. The loneliness of this original move is part
of its discipline.

The prime purpose of withdrawal is to find yourself, to establish a
fresh starting point. You must answer the questions: What am I and
where am I? Why am I doing what I do, and why, despite my many
deliberate convictions, do I omit to do so much that I should do?
Without that act of detachment one must remain only an appendage
of a household, an office, a school, a factory, a party, a guild, a nation.

Once you begin to use your detachment for self-examination, which
is the next step, you will be surprised to find out how much of your
life has been covered over by conventional routine, and how little arises
out of felt needs, clear convictions, intelligible and communicable pur-
poses : you have lost the surety of the wild animal’s reflexes only to sue-

254

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

cumb to a series of social reflexes, quite as blind and as fatal to self-
development. But if you are entirely candid with yourself, as unspar-
ing as Melville’s Pierre tried to be, you will find something worse and
better than you had taken for granted. Better because even if you are
past your nonage you will still find traces of many possible nodes of
^growth that remain unbudded: potentialities that the best men and
women recently found for themselves, for example, even in late mid-
dle life, only under the strange new exactions of total war: the ability
to take responsibility, to break through the barriers of class and cus-
tom: to face danger, torture, death.

But there will be dismaying discoveries, too, even in the happiest
of lives: there perhaps worst of all. You will find that success in your
vocation, a comfortable income and a smooth-running household, all
the felicities that seemed to offer great reward when they were beyond
reach, have become dust and ashes, or at least obstacles to further
growth, once they are attained. If you dig deeper, you may find worse:
in yourself are the aggressions that you find so disruptive in other
men, in your own heart are the lusts and infidelities that would be so
disturbing if they came to light in your married partner: there is
scarcely a crime that you have not committed in your mind, or become
an accessory to in your imagination. “Every man bears within him-
self the germs of every human quality,” Tolstoy remarked; and if
you are honest you will think better of evil men, because you are their
very brother, and worse of your own goodness, which is stained with
so much patent or repressed evil. That inner inspection ends all com-
placency, all self-righteousness.

Most men, Thoreau observed at a far more favorable moment in
Western culture than this, live lives of quiet desperation. Before they
are thirty they have a sense of being caught; and they lack both the
energies and the tools to extricate themselves from the debris they have
allowed to block their return to life. Deficiency of life, and because
of that deficiency an almost unendurable boredom, hangs over our
civilization: the mechanism busily purrs and ticks; but the days of
the favored groups and classes are empty as a handless clock. The
dumb mass of men, preoccupied with the struggle for existence, do not
lack an immediate purpose; but their existence is cursed by the same
ultimate sense of futility.

While our individual acts often make sense, the whole plan of life
in which we are involved has become senseless and unrewarding: men
dream of rocket flights to the moon, stereotyping and extending their

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255

typical present activities, because they mistakenly attribute signifi-^
cance to mere motion or change of position, or because, after all, they
wish to escape. But in fact, the more they move the more they stand
still — indeed slip backward into the non-human. Radio and gambling,
cocktails and promiscuous fornication, soporifics and aphrodisiacs,
television and motor trips and sports, preferably sports that threateif
loss of limb, are all the fillers-in of deficient forms of life: witnesses
to the disruption of the family, the renunciation of parenthood, the re-
treat from citizenship, the failure of education to make whole persons.

To the extent that we have accepted our mechanical apparatus as a
substitute for man’s more vital and human activities, we have accepted
this depletion, staleness, emptiness: so that even in our amusements,
we make a ritual of mechanical repetition — ^the very condition that
menaces freedom, spontaneity, growth.

As our inner selves diminish, our very self-confidence naturally dis-^
appears. We ask a thousand minute questions about the mechanisms
and the institutions that surround us: the one question we do not dare
to ask is: What is our true nature? What are our own desires? What
demands would a more human plan of life make? No small part of
our energy goes into patchwork repairs and piecemeal reforms, be-
cause we have taken all the dominant tendencies in our civilization as
fixed. For lack of any positive vision of life and health, the best that
we can dream of is security — absence of want, absence of disease,
absence of fear, absence of war, as if by adding these negations to-
gether we could create a valid substitute for life.

This is why the first step toward a better life involves a recovery
of inner autonomy. To this end we must recognize the pragmatic im-
portance of dream and ideal: they must ’be tended and minded with
the care we now give only to motor cars or airplanes. This notion has
all but disappeared in the United States and is passing out of fashion
everywhere, the more people submit to the forces of externalization:
objectifying their emptiness. . . . Once I had the good fortune
to hold a seminar for a group of educators: men and women thor-
oughly trained in the use of their tools, most of them doctors of phi-
losophy, people who had already achieved eminence in their profes-
sion or were on the way to it. I asked them how many spent as much
as half an hour a day in complete solitude, with no outside interrup-
tion. Most of them confessed that they had never even considered the
need for such a period: if by rare accident they fell upon such an
empty hour, they felt obliged to ^Mo something” with it; as busy

1 *

258

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

and discipline imposed by the school often is an active source of their
maladjustment and unhappiness: for no one can give himself fully to
a task if his ear is half-cocked for the signal that will compel him
to abandon it.

In a purely negative, defensive way, the industrial worker, during
^e past half-century, has learned collectively to practice the slow-
down in work: sometimes taking his revenge on those concerned with
efficiency and profit by not even pretending to exert his full capacities.
Primitive peoples and most of the cultures of the Orient, above all the
Hindu, have never fallen under the spell of this modem time-obses-
sion; and we have something to learn from their ways. If they pos-
sibly need a greater willingness to accept external order and regu-
larity, we in the West need a more ready submission to the demands
of life.

At critical moments of pressure a single pause of short duration
may become an act of large dimensions. Skilled administrators have
learned to walk out of their offices and be by themselves for five min-
utes before making an important decision; but something far more
pervasive and ramifying than this is necessary before we shall do
justice to the time we command. We must not merely introduce more
breaks into our compulsive routines: we must slow down the whole
tempo of activity and spread attention more evenly over every part
of our day, altering the mechanical beat of our lives, transposing
events to other parts of the day than their usual appointed place. The
threat of dullness in married life, for example, may be partly due
to the fact that too often sexual intercourse occurs only during the
jaded hours that end the day; while the undue charm of extra-marital
erotic adventure may be due to the fact that it often breaks with this
routine: late afternoon was traditionally the favored hour, in Paris,
for illicit lovers’ assignations. The change of time and place by them-
selves may have the quickening effect that people often seek only
through a change of partners.

The first public acknowledgment of the creative pause was, of
course, the Jewish institution of the Sabbath: a social invention of the
first magnitude. But in our Western culture the day of rest has now
become another day of busy work, filled with amusements and rest-
less diversions not essentially different from the routine of the work
week — particularly in America: from the Sunday morning scramble
through the metropolitan newspaper to the distracting tedium of the
motor car excursion, we continually activate leisure time, instead of

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259

letting all work and routine duties come serenely to a halt. Even in
Wordsworth’s day the pressure to be up and doing must have been
heavy: why, otherwise, his lines: ‘‘Think you, mid all this mighty sum
of things for ever speaking, that nothing of itself will come, but we
must still be seeking?” That wise passiveness in which the soul lies
open to whatever forces from any direction may touch it is a highly
necessary counterpoise to over-narrowed and over-directed forms of
activity, particularly to drilled submission to the machine.

But note: the deliberate break in routine must be more than an
occasional exercise: it has a constant place in every well-organized
activity. Even factory managers have come to realize that a period of
rest and recreation within the work day is necessary in order to keep
up the pace of machine production: though few industrial plants are
yet planned with sufficient areas for spontaneous recreation close at
hand. In his account of the Second World War, Mr Winston Churchill
has told us how necessary a nap in the afternoon was for him to re-
gain the power to work, when pressed, far into the night. Similarly
the Mohammedan, with his repeated prayers, disengages himself from
immediate demands and importunities, and comes back to them, one
would guess, with a better perspective and a serener grasp. Reflection,
daydreaming, quiescence, sleep — all these alterations in the tempo,
driven out by the pragmatic demand for visible action and visible
achievement, are essential for keeping conduct truly responsive to
reason. Many foolish habits and routines would not survive if we
dared to pause long enough to look at them.

We shall not make the effort to control time, unless we realize how
much of our work routine is not merely compulsive but obsessive: a
neurotic attempt to create a refuge in external regularity from internal
disorder, to retreat, with an energetic appearance of victory, from the
unsolved problems of life. Compulsive work and the general speed-up
indeed kept people “out of mischief” by diverting their libidinous
fancies, and the daily absorption in work lightened sorrow and di-
minished the tragic sense of life: if one “filled one’s time” with work,
all one’s personal and domestic frustrations would seem less exacer-
bating, and the gnawing sense of a more ultimate emptiness would be
effaced. Western man, then, temporarily found in work a relief from
the unanswerable problems, the mysteries, that give life its wider di-
mensions.

But there is no purpose in incessant systematic work, or in the
leisure that the machine has already introduced, unless we make a

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different use of the time so put at our disposal. To practice an external
speed-up without an internal slow-down that brings with it a more
copio,us supply of personally usable and enjoyable time, is an extrava-
gant misdirection of our time and energy. From a human standpoint,
Jthe chief purpose of time-saving is to decrease the time spent in un-
rewarding instrumental and preparatory tasks, and to increase the
time spent in consummations and fulfillments. Where the process it-
self is a creative and enjoyable one — like the work of the artist, the
scientist, the skilled craftsman, the teacher — reduction of time is
actually a curtailment of life.

Even in the most rewarding vocations, some time-saving may be
needful, in order that we may each assimilate in fuller measure a
world whose boundaries in time and space now spread far beyond the
narrow circle of the limited individual ego. We must save time in the
present, in other words, in order to spend time more actively in the
past and the future; for it is by his critical assimilation of history and
biography — the individual’s and the world’s — and by his selective
forecasts and projections into the future, that modern man differs most
decisively from the representatives of other cultures.

Now specialized thinking, which proceeds along a single track and
avoids all side excursions, was mainly a time-saving device. In our
need to create balanced persons, we must resort to polyphonic or con-
trapuntal thinking, thinking that carries a series of related themes to-
gether so that in the process they simultaneously work upon each other
and modify each other. By its very nature, contrapuntal thinking is
a time-consuming device, inimical to any form of speed-up: it is
quicker to rehearse a solo part than to bring an orchestra to per-
fection.

Take the case of a heart specialist who examines a patient with a
functional disturbance of the heart. When that organ is considered as
an isolated fact, the main points to be determined are those revealed
only by physical examination. But a true physician, guided by a phi-
losophy of the organism, must make a much more subtle and complex
approach to the problem. He thinks not of the abstract anatomical
heart, but of a particular heart — in relation to his patient’s history,
which is a biological and social fact; in relation to habits of nutri-
tion, which is a physiological and social fact; in relation to occupa-
tion, which is an economic fact; in relation to home environment, which
is a geographic and personal fact; and in relation to psychological
and sexual problems — all of which contribute to the whole picture.

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261

Permanently to effect a change in the faulty function, the physician
may have to prescribe a different vocation or a psychoanalytic treat-
ment.

Such diagnosis and therapy will often lack the swiftness and pat-
ness of the old-fashioned specialist’s method: to arrive at a compe-
tent diagnosis and bring about a permanent cure will often take far*
more time. Even if one allows for intuitive shortcuts, they can hardly
be safely practiced without a circumspect check-up of many facts not
visible in the doctor’s office. Without a slowing down of the tempo,
we cannot in fact do justice to all the levels and aspects of contempo-
rary knowledge. Contrapuntal thinking itself, if widely practiced, will
help to slow down the tempo of life: it will even reduce that over-
productivity which threatens to choke up the very sources of knowl-
edge. Once we begin to think organically, that is, simultaneously at
every level, the results should be far more sound and durable, when
they are achieved: but they will be scantier in quantity. In future,
people will perhaps be happy to accomplish in a whole lifetime, as part
of a fully integrated effort, what they now do in the course of a
decade, with a few of their functions over-stimulated and over-tasked,
and the rest of their capacities in a state of inanition or collapse. On
this basis, both knowledge and life will gain.

One of the great problems of the transitional era, then, is to recon-
cile the external, mechanical, public time-schedule that now governs
so much of our activities with organic, personal, self-controlled time,
associated with metabolism, memory, and cumulative human experi-
ence, dependent upon the rate of growth, the intensity and extent of
activity, the capacity for assimilation. The first contributes a great
potential margin of free time, and along with it the free energy needed
for enjoying it, leisure and energy on a scale no other civilization has
ever offered to so many of its members, except under a constant threat
of dearth and starvation. But the second, which has so far found no
adequate forms in our society, must now be consciously developed, in
order to take full advantage of this opportunity. Subjective time —
Bergson’s duree — ^keeps a different rhythm from the planets and the
clock.

Though our first reaction to the external pressure of time neces-
sarily takes the form of the slow-down, the eventual effect of libera-
tion will be to find the right measure and tempo for every human activ-
ity, and to introduce, at will, appropriate variations: in short, to keep
time in life as we do in music, not by obeying the mechanical beat of

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

the metronome — a device only for beginners — ^but by finding the ap-
propriate tempo from passage to passage, modulating the pace accord-
ing to human need and purpose. We shall not be fully in control of
our civilization, or able to express the higher qualities of life, until
it is possible to reduce the tempo or accelerate it in response, not to
ihe machine’s requirements for production, but to man’s requirements
for a full and harmonious life. When we reach that stage, even our
accelerandos will become more meaningful. Instead of hastening all
our activities, under the vain conviction that ‘Ve are getting some-
where,” we shall take our time — ^knowing that even the spacing of the
silent intervals is part of the music.

4: THE GREAT GOOD PLACE

In time, if the practice of withdrawal becomes general, we will have
to create a special social structure for it: let us call the new form of
cloister The Great Good Place in honor of the fable in which Henry
James not merely diagnosed the formidable pressures of our time, but
also indicated in an imaginative way the kind of environment and rou-
tine needed to overcome them. No house in the future will be gen-
erously planned that does not have its closet or its cell, to supplement
the only equivalent for it today, the bathroom; no city will be well
designed that does not set apart places of withdrawal: solitary walks,
secluded woodland hideouts, imfrequented towers hard to climb, de-
vious paths, like the old Ramble in Central Park, no fewer of these
than pf public places where people can go in groups for social com-
mimion or common recreation. The whole tendency of our minds, dur-
ing the last century of mechanized urban expansion, was so opposed
to this need for withdrawal that the ideal of almost all town planners,
up to now, has been to make all places equally accessible, equally
open, equally public.

Now so far the cloister has performed only an involuntary part in
the re-building of the person and the community. Though monastic
withdrawal was dismissed as a medieval superstition by the rational-
ists of the nineteenth century, the fact is that it continued to operate:
for the cloister had its part in transforming the vision and personality
of the great revolutionary leaders, in repeated periods of forced re-
tirement to exile in foreign countries, above all in the abstemious regu-
lar discipline of the prison. From Karl Marx to Lenin and Stalin, from
Herzen and Kropotkin to Dostoyevsky and Hitler, from Mazzini and

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263

Garibaldi to Gandhi and Nehru, a great succession of leaders submit-
ted, however unwillingly, to the inner concentration that prison life
brought with it. For many a young man, during this period, long voy-
ages at sea played a similar part: it was at sea that Henry ’George
got his first intuition of his intellectual mission; and Herman Melville
quite rightly called the whaling ship he sailed on his Harvard Colle^,
indeed one may well trace to his long meditations on the maintop
much of the originality of vision he brought into the world.

Plainly a habit of life so precious must not be left to chance: nor
need it be confined to the archaic forms that have been preserved in
the Catholic Churches — ^though the silence and inner concentration of
the monastery will long serve as an archetypal pattern of The Great
Good Place. We need not court political repression or social disaster
before we make use of the salutary function of the cloister: in our
search for wholeness and balance we shall rather seek to democratize
this institution and make it more generally available. This involves
likewise a rearrangement of our time schedules. One of the marks of
the new school and the new university will be the provision of hours
of withdrawal, not spent in classroom study or in sport, in the midst
of its regular work day: a period of concentration and reflection, in
which the work of active selection and spiritual assimilation can go on.

The physical adjunct to this concentration is the absence of visible
distractions: an architecture, as Henry James put it, “‘all beautified
with omissions.” This ensures the positive presence of esthetic order
and clarity. At best, the alternating rhythm of wide landscape or sea-
scape and walled room or closed garden is what brings the inner life
to highest pitch: provided that there are no intruders from the outer
world during one’s period of concentration. Mr. Arnold Toynbee has
well emphasized the process of “withdrawal and return” in creating
leaders with new schemes and bold plans. Perhaps Adolf Hitler was
never so dangerous to the world, in his corrupt intuitions, than when
he withdrew frequently to his eyrie in Berchtesgaden ; similarly, he
was never so stupid, crass, and uninventive as when he immersed him-
self in the details of war, and lost the detachment and the wide per-
spectives he gained in his more or less solitary retreats. Roosevelt
found a similar detachment in a ship at sea.

Those who omit this act of recuperation arid re-creation, by over-
submission to the pressure of practical affairs, lose their hold over
these affairs: they mechanically plod along the course on which, by
external accident rather than positive choice, their feet have been set.

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Detachment: silence: innerness — ^these are the undervalued parts of our
life, and only by their deliberate restoration, both in our personal
habits and in our collective routines, can we establish a balanced
regimerf.

At first, the discipline of withdrawal will be painful, since the tread-
mfil of our daily life leads us to go through so many smooth involun-
tary motions. Mere abstention involves a mighty effort. The very feel-
ings we restore to consciousness will be painful and the actions that
may follow difiicult: for we must first say No to the dominant claims
of our time, before we shall he able to say Yes to those we shall create
to replace them. Perhaps the chief curse of our condition, at first, will
be the realization of how far we shall have to go before we become
self-acting, self-directed, self-confident persons once more: how far
the events that have victimized the last two generations, the series of
wars, revolutions, economic catastrophes, and more wars, culminating
in the prospect of even more meaningless forms of random slaughter,
are the result of our own continued self-abdication. The goods of this
society we have taken to ourselves; but the evils we have not resisted,
since we did not dare to find them in ourselves, but attributed them to
wholly external machinations or circumstances.

Even in little ways these truths are open to demonstration. In my
class on the Nature of Personality at Stanford University, I once asked
my students, as part of a weekly exercise, to make a plan for the way
in which they intended to spend a whole day; and then, when the day
was over, to set down what they actually did hour by hour and com-
pare it with their original program. That proved a useful exercise:
for each student was surprised to find how easily his firmest intentions
had been diverted by a little succession of outside pressures and stimuli
over which he had exercised no control. This was not the miscarriage
of Napoleon’s set plans of battle, a matter through which^Tolstoy sar-
donically illustrated the opposition between reason and calculation
and the unexpectedness of life itself, since battles too easily get out
of hand through forces too complex for human control. No: in the
case of the students it was a demonstration, quite typical of our whole
culture, of how the infirmity of our inner convictions and intentions,
indeed our profound lack of self-respect, makes us the easy prey of
chance stimuli, which exercise imdue authority merely because they
come from the outside.

Today external arresting sensations take the place of rational mean-
ings as in advertising: external stimuli replace inner purposes; and so

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265

we drift, from moment to moment, from hour to hour, indeed from
one end of a lifetime to another, without ever regaining the initiative
or making an active bid for freedom. Since we do not discipline and
direct our dreams we submit to nightmares: lacking an ipner life, we
lack an outer life that is worth having, too; for it is only by their
coeval development and their constant interpenetration that life itsSlf
can flourish.

The moral should be plain: if, as Gregory the Great said, he who
would hold the fortress of contemplation must first train in the camp
of action, the reverse, for our times, is even more essential: he who
would sally forth with a new plan of action must first withdraw to the
innermost recesses of contemplation, on whose walls, when he becomes
accustomed to the solitude and the darkness, a new vision of life will
appear: not the objective after-image of the world he has left, but the
subjective fore-image of the world he will return to and re-make.

5 : THE NEED FOR TWO LIVES

There is one further reason for the practice of withdrawal and spirit-
ual concentration: perhaps the most important reason of all. To live
wisely, each of us must lead a twofold life. We must live once in the
actual world, and once more in our minds; and though we cannot give
the same amount of time to the second as to the first, we can use the
economy of symbols and images, as we do in nocturnal dreams, to en-
compass as much life in a few minutes, if we secure the free time in
the first place, as we could by actual hours of living.

John Dewey has emphasized, quite rightly, the fact that thought
which does not ultimately guide action is incomplete. But the reverse
of Dewey’s dictum is likewise true. Action that does not, in turn, lead
to reflection, is perhaps even more gravely incomplete. For one per-
son who is lost so completely in reverie or abstract thought that he
forfeits the capacity to act, there are now a hundred so closely com-
mitted to action or routine that they have lost the capacity for rational
insight and contemplative reconstruction: therefore they have lost the
very possibility of re-formation and self-direction. But it is only by
constant reflection and evaluation that our life, in fact, becomes fully
meaningful and purposeful. In addition, when we prolong the good
moments, by holding the flavor of them on the tongue, we achieve a
sense of completion and fulfillment that comes by no other method.
This is one of the reasons perhaps for the deep inner joy and perpet-

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THE COT^DUCT OF LIFE

ually self-renewing life of the great painters. In the humblest life
that has achieved the capacity for reflection — and in rural cultures
the gift is still not unknown among simple people — ^the second living
sweetens and deepens the first.

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without
fteparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the
failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere be-
ginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before
we have acquired even a novice’s skill; and often our moments of
seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have ac-
quired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight,
not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but
even before we have mastered our instruments: even worse, a large
part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must im-
provise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages.
On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty
and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the
passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when
we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can antici-
pate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer
despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our
actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony
and progression.

In some respects, education gives us a foretaste of life and a little
anticipatory practice: it serves us best perhaps in naive forms, as in
little girls’ play at keeping house and tending dolls or the games and
tests young boys devise for themselves. But there is no more time to
anticipate life in detail than there is to re-enact it in detail. In the na-
ture of things, each one of us, no matter how conscientious his inten-
tions, commits many errors in living: but fortunately, it is not by the
avoidance or the denial of these negative moments but by their assimi-
lation and their eventual transformation that the human person grows.

Before we have acquired any large degree of skill in living, we
have already made momentous decisions or have had them made for
us; and we have committed ourselves to courses that may turn out to
be fatal to our best impulses. What is more, in the act of sailing be-
fore the wind, we may be deflected, through absorption in the activity
itself and the feeling of effortless movement that attends it, from the
course we have deliberately chosen. All these choices, decisions, com-
mitments, if allowed to accumulate, become progressively more ir-

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267

remediable. In our very desire to get more swiftly to our goal, we may
neglect to look at charts or to take soundings, till suddenly we feel
our ship scraping bottom — if we do not in fact crash more disastrously
on the rocks. If most of us realized early enough the fact that w^ have
only one life to lead, and that every moment of it that escapes reflec-
tion is irretrievable, we should live it differently. Too often, halfwasir
through the journey of life, we suddenly awaken to the fact that we
will have no second chance on earth to rectify our errors: a decisive,
often a tragic moment.

This day of reckoning is fatal to the extent that it has not been an-
ticipated. Consider the woman who, absorbed in her professional ca-
reer, has too long postponed having children: one day she finds her
period of childbearing is nearing an end; and if she labors under any
physiological handicaps she may, despite all efforts at retrieval, have
missed this part of her destiny: too late! Or take the man who has
failed to give himself to the life of his family: preoccupied with his
advancement in his business or profession, or even with a dutiful at-
tempt to ‘‘provide well” for his household in an economic sense, he
may have deprived his wife or his growing children of companionship
or the more inward manifestations of love. Too late, he may awaken
to find that his best opportunities have slipped from him: his sons and
daughters have grown up and even if they have not been made resent-
ful by his neglect, are out of his reach: he will be lucky if he finds
the satisfactions of vicarious fatherhood as grandfather. So with a
hundred other commitments. One cannot at the end of one’s life re-
deem one’s earlier mistakes: for it is not atonement that one needs
but a chance to re-direct one’s efforts.

How, then, may we curb these fatal commitments and correct our
errors before we are undone by them? There is, I believe, but one
answer: we must extend the dismaying shortness of life by living it
twice, as we encounter it day by day: that is, each of us must slow
down his pace sufficiently to follow up his daily performances with
the constant practice of meditation and reflection: a daily re-living, in
which we examine our target, appraise our marksmanship, re-adjust
our sights. On the positive side, we shall thereby prolong and enhance
by further reflection whatever has given us sustenance or delight: a
great boon in a time of violence and trouble, of interrupted lives and
premature deaths, like the present era. A large part of life, particu-
larly the succession of functions and actions that punctuate the stages
of growth, is non-repeatable except in the mind: one must correct the

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

mistakes of youth by appropriate actions in youth, not by compensa-
tory efforts in maturity; and so with each other phase. Perhaps the
best part of psychoanalytic therapy is this second-living; but it needs
to be supplemented by the Calvinist habit of the daily self-examination.

All this is but to repeat, in another form, the advice of Father Zos-
si«na, in The Brothers Karamazov; “Every day and every hour, every
minute, walk around yourself and watch yourself, and see that your
image is a seemly one.” Only by an act of planned detachment is the
living of this second life possible: that is why withdrawal requires a
form: a time and a place and even if possible a structure that is dedi-
cated to one’s second life — ^not as an escape from one’s active exist-
ence, but as the means whereby it is completed, and in turn gives
fresh impulses and fresh values to the future. Lacking this second life,
we neither carry over consciously what is valuable from the past, nor
successfully dominate the future; we fail to bring to it the energy and
insight we have potentially acquired in the act of living: rather, we
let ourselves be carried along by the tide, bobbing helplessly up and
down like a corked bottle, with a message inside that may never come
to shore.

6: STRIPPING FOR ACTION

The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt predicted that the corrup-
tions and weaknesses already observable in Western civilization by
the middle of the nineteenth century would result in the coming of the
Terrible Simplifiers: people who, with ruthless decision and unstinted
force, would overthrow even the good institutions that were, in fact,
stifling the growth of the human spirit. “People,” he wrote, “may not
yet like to imagine a world whose rulers completely ignore law, pros-
perity, profitable labor, and industry, credit, etc.,” a world governed
by military corporations and single parties: but such a world becomes
possible when the majority no longer, through orderly means, exer-
cises the initiative in continuously re-forming and re-directing institu-
tions to serve human purposes. What the virtuous will not do in a
reasonable constructive way, the criminal and barbarian take upon
themselves to do, negatively and irrationally, for the sheer pleasure
of destruction. When individuals shun responsibility as persons, their
place is taken politically by a tyrant, who recovers freedom of initia-
tive through crime.

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Even before Burckhardt, Dostoyevsky had predicted, with remark-
able prescience, what would occur. In that enigmatic narrative. Letters
from the Underworld, in which Dostoyevsky put so many challenging
truths into the mouth of his sniveling, repulsive chief character, the
veritable prototype of Hitler, he described the utilitarian heaven -of
the nineteenth century: the heaven, still, of popular current scien'Se,
in which all the questions that had heretofore troubled men would be
precisely answered and all human acts would be mathematically com-
puted according to nature’s laws, so that the world will cease to know
any wrongdoing. Then he observes: “I should not be surprised if,
amid all this order and regularity of the future, there should suddenly
arise, from some quarter or another, some gentleman of lowborn — or
rather, of retrograde and cynical — demeanor, who, setting his arms
akimbo, should say to you all: ^How now, gentlemen? Would it not be
a good thing if, with one accord, we were to kick all this solemn
wisdom to the winds and send these logarithms to the devil, and to
begin to live our lives again according to our own stupid whimsy?’ ”

This is the nihilistic answer to the serious condition that every
civilization at length finds itself in: the result of over-organization,
the multiplication of superfluous wants, an excess of regularity and
routine in the conduct of daily life, a fossilization of even happy rit-
uals: all resulting in a failure of human initiative and a dull submis-
sion to what seems an overbearing impersonal determinism. In such
an existence people eat for the sake of supporting meat packers’ or-
ganizations and dairymen’s associations, they guard their health care-
fully for the sake of creating dividends for their life insurance corpo-
rations, they earn their daily living for the sake of paying dues, taxes,
mortgages, installments on their car or their television sets, or fulfill-
ing their quota in a Five-Year Plan: in short, they satisfy the essen-
tial needs of life for extraneous reasons. Just as in the business or-
ganizations, run on such terms, the overhead tends to eat up the profit,
so with life in general, the preparatory acts deplete the appropriate
consummations.

Such a society as ours eventually ties itself up into knots by its in-
ability to put first things first. When a community reaches a point
where no one can make a decision of the simplest sort without bring-
ing into play an elaborate technique of research or accountancy, with-
out enlisting the aid of innumerable specialists who take responsibility
for only their minute fragments of the process, all the normal acts of
living must be slowed down to such an extent that the economies orig-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

inally achieved by division of labor and large-scale organization are
nullified. Thus the technique of diagnosis becomes as burdensome to
the patient as his disease: indeed it becomes an auxiliary disease. At
that point, the life of a community will be stalled and frustrated: it
will not be capable of anticipating or circumventing the simplest crisis.

But no community can permit itself to be stalled for long; for if
we do not find a benign method of simplification, then the Terrible
Simplifiers will come on the scene, recapturing freedom through sav-
agery and charlatanism, if not through the polite forms sanctioned by
an over-developed civilization. When our apparatus of fact-finding
and truth-proving becomes too complicated, the Terrible Simplifiers
will resort to brazen lies and childish superstitions. If our factual his-
torians ostracize the Burckhardts and the Henry Adamses for daring
to look into the future on the basis of their knowledge and wisdom,
people who seek guidance will take to astrological horoscopes as a
substitute.

To escape the Terrible Simplifiers one must recognize the actual
danger of the condition through which they obtain their ascendance
over the frustrated majority: for the condition these charlatans profess
to correct is in fact a serious one. Instead of closing our eyes to its
existence, we must use art and reason to effect a benign simplification,
which will give back authority to the human person. Life belongs to
the free-living and mobile creatures, not to the encrusted ones; and
to restore the initiative to life and participate in its renewal, we must
counterbalance every fresh complexity, every mechanical refinement,
every increase in quantitative goods or quantitative knowledge, every
advance in manipulative technique, every threat of superabundance or
surfeit, with stricter habits of evaluation, rejection, choice. To achieve
that capacity we must consciously resist every kind of automatism:
buy nothing merely because it is advertised, use no invention merely
because it has been put on the market, follow no practice merely be-
cause it is fashionable. We must approach every part of our lives
with the spirit in which Thoreau undertook his housekeeping at Wal-
den Pond: be ready, like him, even to throw out a simple stone, if it
proves too much trouble to dust. Otherwise, the sheer quantitative in-
crease in the data of scientific knowledge will produce ignorance: and
the constant increase in goods will produce a poverty of life.

There is no domain today where methods of simplification must
not be introduced. Because of the uninhibited production of books and
scholarly reviews, there is, for example, hardly a single province of

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271

thought where the human mind can make an adequate survey of the
literature on any subject, except of the minutest province, come to in-
telligent conclusions, or move confidently from reflection to practice.
Our ingenious mechanical methods of solving this problem, like the
invention of the microfilm, increase the size of the total burden: the
only true salvation, in this and every other sphere, is voluntarily
restrict production at its source and to increase our selectivity: both
true simplifications, though only the enlightened and the courageous
can apply them. This holds for the whole routine of life: never to use
mechanical power when human muscles can conveniently do the work,
never to use a motor car where one might easily walk, never to ac-
quire information or knowledge except for the satisfaction of some
immediate or prospective want — such modes of simplification, though
individually insignificant, add up to a considerable degree of emanci-
pation. A popular mentor, himself no enemy of the profit motive, once
suggested that one should never waste time opening second class mail;
and if that advice were generally taken, at least in America, a vast
amount of time and energy would be saved: indeed whole forests
would be preserved. Many other institutions will, in time, follow the
example of a progressive school in New York: a school that once gave
all its students intelligence tests and heaped up a vast mass of unused
and unnecessary data. Now it has destroyed tiiese files and it gives
special tests only to those who gravely need such additional checks.

In Western coimtries one of the prime marks of an organic change
in our culture — ^the hallmark of a new brotherhood and sisterhood —
would probably be the drastic reduction of the now compulsive habits
of smoking and drinking: along with this would go a return, on the
part of women, to a mode of wearing their hair which would forego
the elaborate mechanical or chemical procedure for producing fash-
ionable uniformity of curl after original Hollywood models. Hundreds
of thousands of acres of land would be freed for food-growing by
curtailment of tobacco alone, along with some slight direct improve-
ment of health, and a release, if the movement were spontaneous,
from neurotic obsessions. The fact that even in a time of worldwide
starvation, after the Second World War, no one dared to suggest even
a partial conversion of tobacco land to food-growing, shows how rigid,
rigid almost to the point of rigor mortis, our civilization has become:
with no sufficient power of adaptation to reality. Nor is this demon-
stration lessened by the fact that there is record of starving men ask-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

ing for tobacco ahead of food: that merely shows the depth of our
perversion of life-needs.

Many effective kinds of simplification will perhaps be resisted at
first on the ground that this means a ‘""lowering of standards.” But this
overlooks the fact that many of our standards .are themselves extrane-
o?*s and purposeless. What is lowered from the standpoint of mechan-
ical complexity or social prestige may be raised from the standpoint
of the vital function served, as when the offices of friendship them-
selves replace, as Emerson advocated in his essay on household econ-
omy, elaborate preparations of food and service, of napery and silver.

Consider the kind of frugal peasant living that Rousseau first ad-
vocated, when he chose to live in a simple cottage, instead of in the
mansion of his patron, surrounded by “comforts” : all this wipes away
time-consuming rituals and costly temptations to indigestion. Or con-
sider the gain in physical freedom modern woman made, when the
corset and petticoats, the breast-deformers, pelvis-constrictors, back-
bone-curvers of the Victorian period gave way to the garb of the early
1920’s, without girdle, brassiere, or even stocking supporters: a high
point of freedom in clothes from which women sheepishly recoiled
under the deft browbeating of manufacturers with something to sell.

Naturally the sort of simplification needed must itself conform to
life-standards. Thoreau’s over-simplification of his diet, for instance,
probably undermined his constitution and gave encouragement to the
tuberculosis from which he finally died. By now we know that a diet
consisting of a single kind of food is not part of nature’s economy:
the amino acids appear to nourish the body only when various ones
are present in different kinds of food: so that the lesson of life is not
to confuse simplicity with monotony. So, too, a tap of running water,
fed by gravity from a distant spring, is in the long run a far more
simple device, judged by the total man-hours used in production and
service, than the daily fetching of water in a bucket: as the bucket, in
turn, is more simple than making even more frequent journeys to the
spring to slake one’s thirst directly. Simplicity does not avoid mechan-
ical aids: it seeks only not to be victimized by them. That image should
save us from the imbecile simplifiers, who reckon simplicity, not in
terms of its total result on living, but in terms of immediate first costs
or in a pious lack of visible apparatus.

Sporadically, during the last three centuries, many benign simplifi-
cations h^ve in fact come to pass throughout Western civilization;

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though, as in the case of women’s dress just noted, they have some-
times been followed by reactions that have left us as badly off as ever.
Rousseau, coming after the Quakers, carried their simplification of
manners through to diet, to child nurture, and to education f while
Hahnemann began a similar change in medicine, a change followed
through by Dr William Osier, under whom hundreds of spurious drufs
and complicated prescriptions were discarded, in favor of the Hippo-
cratic attention to diet and rest and natural restoratives. In handicraft
and art and architecture the same general change was effected, first
by William Morris, in his rule: ‘‘Possess nothing that you do not know
to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Modern architecture, though
it has often been distracted and perverted by technical over-elabora-
tion, can justify its essential innovations as an attempt to simplify the
background of living, so that the poorest member of our society will
have as orderly and harmonious an environment as the richest: it has
discarded complicated forms as a badge of class and conspicuous
waste. Wherever the machine is intelligently adapted to human needs,
it has the effect of simplifying the routine of life and releasing the
human agent from slavish mechanical tasks. It is only where the per-
son abdicates that mechanization presents a threat.

But in order to recover initiative for the person, we must go over
our whole routine of life, as with a surgeon’s knife, to eliminate every
element ^ purposeless materialism, to cut every binding of too-neat
red tape, to remove the fatty tissue that imposes extra burdens on
our organs and slows down all our vital processes. Simplicity itself is
not the aim of this effort: no, the purpose is to use simplicity to pro-
mote spontaneity and freedom, so that we may do justice to life’s new
occasions and singular moments. For what Ruskin said of the differ-
ence between a great painter, like Tintoretto, and a low painter, like
Teniers, holds for every manifestation of life: the inferior painter, not
recognizing the difference between high and low, between what is in-
tensely moving and what’ is emotionally inert, gives every part of his
painting the same refinement of finish, the same care of detail. The
great painter, on the other hand, knows that life is too short to treat
every part of it with equal care: so he concentrates on the passages of
maximum significance and treats hastily, even contemptuously, the
minor passages: his shortcuts an3 simplifications are an effort to give
a better account of what matters. This reduction to essentials is the
main art of life.

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7 : RE-UNION WITH THE GROUP

Withdrawal, detachment, simplification, reflection, liberation from
automatism — ^these are all but preliminary steps in the re-building of
the self and the renewal of the society of which we are a part. These
initial acts may, and in fact must, be taken by each of us alone: but
the purpose of our withdrawal, of our fasting and purgation, is to re-
awaken our appetite for life, to make us keen to discriminate between
food and poison and ready to exercise choice. Once we have taken the
preparatory steps, we must return to the group and re-imite ourselves
with those who have been undergoing a like regeneration and are
thereby capable of assuming responsibility and taking action. In rela-
tively short order this fellowship may enfold men and women in every
country, of every religious faith, of every cultural pattern.

Here the rule is to begin with what lies nearest at hand. Who is our
neighbor? He who has need of us whether he lives next door or half-
way round the earth. Our best neighbor is he who is ready, for the
sake of our common fellowship, to join with us in overcoming the
barriers of space and time and culture. Now our first duty today is
to secure the continued existence of the human race and to put all
more local claims below this paramount condition: before we can have
a sound village government, we must have a world government. Fami-
lies cannot be permanently united with any prospect of a gc3l»d life to-
gether until mankind is united. No household, no village or city, no
trade union or chamber of commerce, no church or temple, is perform-
ing even its minimum obligation to ensure its own continued existence
unless a large part of its activity is actively devoted to the extension
of human fellowship and to the institution of a common world law and
government, capable of transmuting strife and struggle and frictions
and contentions into peaceful forms of conflict and positive co-opera-
tions. Universal service is the price of peace; and if we do not under-
take it voluntarily, in our daily acts, we shall have it imposed upon
ourselves in the negative forms of war, at a far more fearful sacrifice.
We cannot escape these obligations and withdraw once more into
purely private self-centered lives, individual or national: our only
choice is whether we will perform them voluntarily in the name of
life, or under strict compulsion in the name of destruction and death.

Our part in the group can no longer be a passive one: it is not
enough to belong: one must act and lead; and our achievement of

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balance will be meaningless unless it makes us ready, on demand, to
take our turn at any or all the roles in a group: to command and to
think, to emotionalize and energize, to assimilate and obey. Groups
become sluggish and automatic in their behavior, incapable of niaking
fresh decisions like persons, just to the extent that their members ac-
cept as permanent a stereotyped division of labor and function. Neithesf
democracy nor effective representation is possible until each partici-
pant in the group — and this is true equally of a household or a nation
— devotes a measurable part of his life to furthering its existence.
Our present division of time, whereby forty-odd hours a week is given
to work, fifty-odd hours to sleep, and the remaining hours mainly to
individual concerns or family affairs and recreation, cannot possibly
bring about a balanced life.

The change to be effected in group life is not one that will proceed,
like the changes envisaged by earlier forms of revolution, through
the agency of political parties; and it is the precise opposite of every
form of totalitarian absolutism and single party rule. For just as
time and space, for modem man, is multi-dimensional, so likewise are
political activities: the new forms of group living and group initiative
will become effective at every level: in the family and the neighbor-
hood at one pole, and in a world government, embracing humanity, at
the other pole.

Each group, like each person, must become increasingly self-govern-
ing and self-developing, with a breaking down of many existing auto-
matic political and economic controls. But in the very act of recover-
ing initiative and extending its proper activities, even the smallest
group will, as a constant preoccupation of its existence, work to build
up more universal co-operations. No group lives to itself. To create a
man of truly human dimensions one needs the co-operation of a uni-
versal society; to create a xmiversal society, one must begin and end
with men who seek fullness of life: who refuse to be insignificant frac-
tions and seek to become integers. These are two aspects of the same
act; and with that act, a new world will come into being.

For the awakened man and woman, life itself is essentially a proc-
ess of education, through maturation, crisis, and renewal: in that
process, the fullest potentialities of the community and the person are
realized. Such a philosophy does not segregate learning from living,
or knowledge from action. As adult he never leaves the school behind
him, for at no point does he believe that his education is completed.
When his daily work ceases to be formative and educative, he will

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make special efforts to restore these c/ualities, or seek another occu-
pation; for he will regard such a loss of interest as a direct impover-
ishment of life. The mark of the balanced personality, in the indus-
trial system, will be not higher productivity or higher wages — ^though
both may be possible and necessary — ^but the integration of work and
leisure and social life and education: such a transformation as has
taken place during the last decade in France under the Boimondau
experiment.*

To achieve unity in the person, the balanced man has need of a
community that is equally full and complete; and that, above all, has
recovered in every form of organization the human scale and the ca-
pacity for intimate knowledge and self-directed action that goes with
the human scale. The restoration of the human scale is a matter of
utmost importance : till that change takes place no effective regeneration
can be brought about. The very extension of the range of community
in our time, through national and worldwide organizations, only in-
creases the need for building up, as never before, the intimate cells,
the basic tissue, of social life: the family and the home, the neighbor-
hood and the city, the work-group and the factory. Our present civili-
zation lacks the capacity for self-direction because it has committed it-
self to mass organizations and has built its structures from the top
down, on the principle of all dictatorships and absolutisms, rather
than from the bottom up: it is efficient in giving orders and compelling
obedience and providing one-way communication: but it is in the main
still inept in everything that involves reciprocity, mutual eiid, two-way
commimication, give-and-take.

No matter how worldwide and inclusive the province of any asso-
ciation or institution, whether it be a trade union or a church or a
bank, there must be, at the central core, an organic form of associa-
tion: a group small enough for intimacy and for personal evaluation,
so that its members can meet frequently as a body and know each
other well, not as units but as persons: small enough for rotation in
offices and roles, for direct, face-to-face meeting, for discussion and
decision on the basis of intimate understanding: the close loyalties of
friendship are needed to tide over all conflict and internal opposition.
All organic communities of a larger stature should, ideally, be formed
by the federation of smaller units: any other method is but a provi-
sional and mechanical solution, destructive of the very purposes of
association.

* See All Things Common, by Claire Huchet Bishop in Bibliography.

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The perception that every association has a natural limit of growth
in its primary units might be called Ebenezer Howard’s theorem.
Though he set it forth only in relation to cities, it applies to every
kind of group organization. By now a succession of sociological stud-
ies, from Le Play and Cooley to Homans, re-enforced by an increas-
ing number of practical experiments, has shown that limitation of sia^
is an essential attribute of all organic grouping: the true alternative
to big, rigid organizations, cramped by their self-imposed routine, is
to limit the number of people in the local group, and to multiply and
federate these groups.

In short, balance, even in large organizations and communities, de-
mands a return to the human scale and the personal, I-and-thou rela-
tionship. Only by creating such organic self-limited — but not self-
centered or self-contained — communities in the school, the factory,
the office, the city, can the balanced person have the milieu in which
his new powers may be more effectively exercised. There is no upper
limit to effective association once these conditions for avoiding over-
centralization and congestion and for promoting self-education and
self-government are observed.

In an era of balance, the educational and political aspects of life
will take precedence over the economic ones: a reversal of nineteenth
century practice. As in the Boimondau experiment in France, the de-
velopment of the worker as person will modify the system of associa-
tion and technical production; though the latter will often gain in
purely physical terms as a result of removing the psychological block-
ages that have so long impeded full production. What administrators
of large enterprises like Mr Chester Barnard have done in analyzing
the processes of administration the workers themselves will increas-
ingly do as they take over the tasks of self-government and self-
administration.

What possibly gives the Boimondau scheme great significance for
the future is the fact that it derives, not from any doctrinaire leader-
ship, but from the inner compulsion on the part of the workers to unify
their lives: to make the work process provide the means for re-inte-
grating town and country, education and family life, leisure and sys-
tematic effort. These workers, retaining their original ideological
identity as Catholics, materialists, humanists, protestants, socialists,
conservatives, communists, have nevertheless moved toward a common
goal and have laid down the framework for a balanced life. If that
method proves viable, it will give a new pattern of development to our

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whole industrial system: one that will create, for the first time, a bal-
anced work community, on sounder lines than Fourier, even in his
best moments, dared to dream.

From this point of view, work and citizenship cannot be divorced:
they are co-ordinate phases of a single life-process whose purpose is
fo create intelligent, animated, and emotionally mature men and women.
The first sound steps toward combining these sundered aspects of life
were taken by Fourier and Froebel over a century ago: the latter with
his conception of the Kindergarten, which started education on the
path it has still to follow to its terminus, and the first in his concep-
tion of the work army for peace — a proposal later modified by William
James in his Moral Equivalent for War.

Once war armies are disbanded, peace armies, on a far larger scale,
must be formed. Every young man and woman, at the age of eighteen
or thereabouts, should serve perhaps six months in a public work corps.
In his own region he will get training and active service, doing a thou-
sand things that need to be done, from planting forests and roadside
strips, supervision of school children in nurseries and playgrounds to
the active companionship with the aged, the blind, the crippled, from
auxiliary work in harvesting to fire-fighting.

Unlike military service, these forms of public work will be carried
out with the educational requirements uppermost; and without any jus-
tifiably uneasy conscience as to the premature coarsening of the fiber
of the tender and the sensitive. No citizen should be exempt from these
common work experiences and services. But every effort should be made,
for the sake of education, to take the student out of his home envi-
ronment for a period, introducing him to other regions and other modes
of life. Those who show special interest and aptitude should be given
the opportunity to perform similar service in an international corps
in order to become active participants in the working life and culture
of other countries.

In time, these planetary student migrations will, let us hope, take
place on an immense scale, comparable to the comings and goings of
unskilled labor from Europe to America at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century: but now worldwide in scope and with teachers, not labor
bosses, to lead them. The result of such transmigrations would be to
enrich every homeland with mature young men and women, who knew
the ways and farings of other men, who would bring back treasures
with them, songs and dances, technical processes and civic customs,

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279

not least, ethical precepts and religious insights, knowledge not taken
at third hand from books, but through direct contact and living ex-
perience: thus, the young would bring back into every village and
city a touch of the universal society of which they form an activ'e part.

Such people would be ready for further study, further travel, fur-
ther research, for further tasks and adventures, as the harried youi?g
people of today, threatened with the horrid compulsions of war,
caught in the bureaucratic routine of school, office, and factory, are
not. They would no longer live in their present parochial world: that
world whose narrow limits are not in fact extended by the vague drib-
ble of information and suggestion that reaches them by way of books
or radios, filtered through many political and ideological sieves.

The present trickle of students already passing back and forth be-
tween certain parts of Europe and America under the Fulbright Act,
are still caught by the routines of conventional education. But in time,
their studies, their civic responsibilities, and their vocational interests
will be united in a new kind of education; and mighty streams of such
students, flowing back and forth along the seaways and skyways, will
eventually irrigate the parched cultural soil of many lands.

Though with some misgivings, I have used a concrete but delib-
erately eutopian illustration of the new doctrines and practices, to
bring out the rich potentialities that lie before us, once we rise to the
challenge of the present crisis, with positive plans and projects, grow-
ing out of an inner renewal. But it would be an error to dismiss this
as a mere fantasy. For what have I suggested but a democratic version
of the grand tour that the favored classes of Europe gave their young
heirs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a system of educa-
tion that did much — in purely class terms of course — ^to promote the
true Concert of Europe, and even to bring about a certain humane for-
bearance in the conduct of war and the settlements of peace that con-
trasts with our present unseemly practices, due to our isolation, our
language barriers, our defective cultural sympathies and our self-
righteous harshness.

The comradeship and understanding of such a world fellowship of
the young, based on common experience and common purposes car-
ried through together, the stimulus of new interest that would come
with foreign service, would turn world co-operation into a working
reality; and in time create a true world community. Such a course of
education in world citizenship would create seasoned young men and

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

women, awakened to the immense variety and diversity of other cul-
tures, yet more conscious than ever, through the services they have
interchanged, of their common humanity. With such young people,
a Wolld Constitution, providing positive world government along such
firm lines as those laid down by G. A. Borgese and his colleagues in
Chicago group, would be in safe hands.

To submit to a more niggardly and isolated life today, to ask for
less from the democratic commitment to universal education than the
opportunity to perform such services, engage in such co-operations,
enjoy such contacts and adventures, is a sign of our defective life-
values, indeed of our barbarized and regressive culture: a culture
sunk, for all its advances in health and technology and economic se-
curity, far below the level of that which prevailed in 1914 throughout
the planet. Even under the very unfavorable conditions of the Second
World War, the planetary deployment of military forces gave many
young people opportunities for first-hand contacts and co-operations.
Unprepared for such intercourse by their education and their pro-
vincial habits of life, the majority of Americans got nothing from these
opportunities: they turned their backs on them, or perhaps came back
with an inflation of self-esteem over American plumbing and iced
drinks. But a significant minority, in every country, was deeply moved
by these experiences: more than one young man and woman, even when
not bound by marriage, has gone back to the far region that awakened
his interest or his loyalty — ^to Burma, China, India, Japan, Italy, or
Palestine, or even Germany — ^to serve as a bridge betv/een Eastern and
Western cultures.

By such means, not by books and constitutions and laws and tech-
nical devices alone, we will create one world. One of the ultimate
aims of our lifetime education will be to make us the sharers in and
creators of this universal culture: out of that development will come
• balanced regions, balanced communities, balanced men. Once the re-
newal we have pictured begins to work in the person, in a multitude
of individuals and groups throughout the world, many projects that
now seem as remote as the International Work Corps will become near:
many plans for the re-building of cities to human scale, for the re-
integration of city and country, for the humanization of industry, for
the development of family life, for the general endowment of the
workers’ new leisure with active opportunities for creation, such as
the artist knows, will become feasible.

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8: DISCIPLINE FOR DAILY LIFE

Each one of us must find and work out for himself the ways in 4vhich
he must modify his life, so as to achieve balance and self-direction,
make the fullest use of his potentialities, and so contribute to the gen-
eral renewal of life. There is no single formula for achieving this
transformation; for the intellectual, so far from needing a balanced
diet of the “hundred best books,” often needs rather a stiff turn at
manual toil or the assumption of active political responsibilities in his
community, or in thought itself intensive study in some neglected
domain.

Similarly the manual worker needs to push his mind far harder
than he has yet learned: to devote himself to ideas as determinedly as
that mid-Victorian British worker who, not being able to buy Ruskin’s
works, copied them out by hand in order to have them in his own pos-
session. “We went down to the mine,” an old miner in England ob-
served to an acquaintance of mine, “with a book of Carlyle’s or Mill’s
in our pocket to read whilst we ate; but the boys today go down with
a newspaper and at night they don’t wrestle with a book, but go to
sleep over the wireless.” No one can doubt that the physical conditions
among miners have vastly improved in recent years; but their mental
attitude has perhaps deteriorated; for they lack the purpose and self-
discipline of the older generation. Seebohm Rowntree’s second Survey
of York confirms this supposition.

The first rule for autonomous development, toward which all edu-
cation should tend, is to be able in normal health to provide for one’s
own wants and regulate one’s own life, without undue dependence upon
others. However ingrained the habits of co-operation in a family, the
ideal person should be schooled to self-reliance. To have the habit of
making one’s own bed, cleaning one’s own room, to be able to take
turns at cooking meals for oneself or others, and performing whatever
other operations are necessary for the maintenance of a household,
including care of the sick and minding children, are essential for the
development of both sexes; if only because this is the main way of
freeing ourselves from claims to service which come down from days
of imiversal slavery.

In this respect, a great advance has been made in many modern
communities: not least in the United States where the frontier tradi-
tion of self-reliance and self-sufficiency has given the males in par-

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

ticular an unusual willingness to look after themselves and to take
on some of the menial burdens of the household. An Italian, self-
exiled from Fascism, told me once that he did not know the real mean-
ing of" freedom until he was established in a little apartment in New
York, and found that since there was no servant to look after him
he was expected to make his own breakfast — and actually accom-
plished this feat. That was both a symbolic and a practical act of lib-
eration. These autonomous activities, bed-making, cooking, dish-wash-
ing, cleaning, provide a certain amount of manual labor, bread labor,
as Tolstoy called it, essential for a balanced life. Such daily work
largely does away with the necessity for special gymnastic exercises.
If in addition one cares for a garden, no further routine exercise is
necessary to keep the adult body in condition: what one may do by
way of walking, swimming, climbing, playing games, will be for re-
laxation and delight.

Part of the discipline of daily life is to organize one’s activities so
as to be able to devote a good share of one’s time and energy to public
service in the community. That service cannot begin too early or be
carried on too consistently; for the resorption of government by the
citizens of a democratic community is the only safeguard against those
bureaucratic interventions that tend to arise in every state through the
negligence, irresponsibility, and indifference of its citizens. Many
services that are now performed inadequately either because the
budget does not provide for them or because they are in the hands
of a remote officialdom, should be performed mainly on a voluntary
basis by the people of a local community. This includes not merely
administrative services too often dodged in a democracy, like service
on school boards, library boards, and the like: it should also include
other kinds of active public work, like the planting of roadside trees,
the care of public gardens and parks, even some of the functions of
the police. Through such work, each citizen would not merely become
at home in every part of his city and region; he would take over the
institutional life of his community as a personal responsibility.

In the new discipline for the daily life, then, public work must re-
ceive, along with one’s vocation and one’s domestic life, its due share
of energy, interest, loving care. War tends to over-concentrate such
claims, divorcing a soldier from his family, forcing him to abandon
completely his vocation: making the claims of the community over-
ride all personal desires and preferences. But no form of integration
that leaves out the constant need for public service will be capable

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283

of redressing the radical unbalance that exists in present-day so-
ciety. The leisure that has now become possible in advanced socie-
ties for workers of all grades must be largely devoted to the tasks
of citizenship; for the more world-embracing become the spheres of
co-operation, the more essential it is that the local units of govern-
ment and administration and industrial organization be vigilantly ad-
ministered, through wide participation in criticism, and through the
exercise of democratic initiative: a matter of giving suggestons and
making demands from the bottom up, not merely a matter of taking
orders from the top down. At the level of the intimate, face-to-face
group politics should, as Michael Graham wisely suggests, be a mat-
ter for weekly, not quadrennial, consultations.

Finally, the re-building of the family, the assumption of one’s role
as lover and parent, as son or daughter, is vital to a balanced life.
During the last decade, even in countries where little thought has been
devoted to the subject, there has been a spontaneous recovery of paren-
tal and family values, on the part of childrerx whose parents had taken
a more narrowly egotistic attitude toward sex and its domestic responsi-
bilities: in this realm, there have been more spontaneous acts of renewal,
perhaps, than in any other department. The violence and evil of our
time have been, when viewed collectively, the work of loveless men:
impotent men who lust after sadistic power to conceal their failure
as lovers: repressed and frustrated men, lamed by unloving parents
and seeking revenge by taking refuge in a system of thought or a
mode of life into which love cannot intrude: at best, people whose
erotic impulses have been cut off from the normal rhythms of life,
self -enclosed atoms of erotic exploit, incapable of assuming the mani-
fold responsibilities of lovers and parents through all the stages of life,
unwilling to accept the breaks and abstentions of pregnancy, making
sexual union itself an obstacle to the other forms of social union that
flow out of family life.

Here the way of growth is twofold; for one thing, it consists in giv-
ing back to marriage the erotic depth and effulgence that a too-docile
bovine acceptance of continuous parenthood, without pause or relief,
had once brought with it. To this end, the introduction of relatively
safe, though still esthetically unsatisfactory, contraceptives has served
a good purpose. But in addition the parental side of marriage needs
far greater fostering than it has yet received. With rising national in-
comes homes must become more generous in space to give full play
to family life; social measures must be taken to help families of four

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or five children from being undue economic burdens to those who
choose to have them: more of the functions that have slid into the
province of the school must go back to the home, once the domestic
environment of house and neighborhood is designed deliberately for
the play and education of children under the tutelage of their parents,
^he loving observation of children’s growth, even some systematic
habit of observing and recording these transformations, in family
books and collections of papers and photographs, brings one of life’s
most precious rewards: yet in our impoverished urban environments,
people devote to bridge or television, to soap operas or to other forms
of sodden play, much of the time that they might spend, with far
greater reward, in intercourse and play with their young.*

The denial of love here arrests the development of love in every
other part of life; whereas the expression of love, through the various
stages of attachment and detachment, from infancy through adoles-
cence, is what contributes to human maturity, all the more because
the last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved: the
willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a
state of emotional dependence. At that point in the parents’ growth,
their love must widen sufficiently to embrace other children besides
their own: otherwise they face desolation and bitterness. Meanwhile
those who fail to achieve love in marriage and parenthood must be
thrice vigilant to compensate that loss in every other relationship by
placing it as far as possible within the pattern of the family.

In short, the sharing of work experiences, the sharing of citizen re-,
sponsibilities, and the sharing of the full cycle of family life, in
homes and communities that are themselves re-dedicated to these val-
ues — ^this is part of the constant discipline of daily life for those who
seek to transform our civilization. Without this balance in our daily
activities, we shall not bring to our larger task the emotional energy
and the undistortedTove — ^not crippled by covert hatred and compensa-
tory fanaticism — ^that it demands.

9; LOVE AND INTEGRATION

Everyone realizes, at least in words, that only through a vast in-
crease of effective love can the mischievous hostilities that now under-
mine our civilization be overcome. The means are plain enough but

* See The Family Log by Keaneth S. Beam in Bibliography.

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the method of application is lacking. Though love could bring regen-
eration, we have still to discover how to generate love: as with peace,
those who call for it loudest often express it least. To make ourselves
capable of loving, and ready to receive love, is the paramount problem
of integration: indeed, the key to salvation.

Both in the individual personality and in a culture as a whole, th^
nature of disintegration is to release impulses of aggression and ex-
pressions of antagonism that were, during the period of development,
sufficiently held in check to be innocuous, indeed, in some degree serv-
iceable to the personality. The transformation of a benign personality
into a belligerent one is one of the frequent aspects of senile decay:
covered traditionally by humorous references. Though social phenom-
ena are of a quite different order, a parallel deterioration, for parallel
social causes, seems to operate there.

The transformation of hate and aggression into kindness, of de-
structiveness into life-furthering activities, depends upon our discover-
ing the formative principle that prevails during the period of growth
and development. Perhaps we can gain a clue to this by looking more
attentively at the conditions that accompany senile breakdown. In that
unfortunate state there is a curtailment of energies, a deterioration of
organic functions, an undercurrent of frustration due to inadequate
co-ordination, an increase of uncertainty and anxiety, and a steady
shortening of the future: with this goes a shriveling of interest in activi-
ties that lie outside the visible present: such a withdrawal as will even-
tually reduce life to the body’s concern with food and evacuation. So
the withdrawal of love and the rise of aggression go hand in hand;
for love is a capacity for embracing otherness, for widening the circle
of interests in which the self may operate, for begetting new forms of
life.

Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate height-
ening of every organic function: a release of impulses from circum-
stances that irrationally thwarted them: richer and more complex pat-
terns of activity: an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations:
a steady lengthening of the future: a faith in cosmic perspectives. Pre-
cisely out of this sense of abundance and fullness of life comes the
readiness to embrace the divine. Instead of withdrawing from situa-
tions it cannot master in order to maintain mere bodily balance, love
risks everything, even life itself, for the sake of a more complete en-
gagement with that which lies outside it and beyond it. On this inter-
pretation, the withdrawal of love is the deadliest sin against life; and

286

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

the unrestricted giving of love and yielding to love are the only effec-
tual means of redeeming its pains, frustrations, and miscarriages.
Those who are impotent to love, from Hitler downward, must seek a
negative counterpart in hatred and disintegration.

Charles Peirce approvingly quoted Henry James Senior on the final
liature of love: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love
to love one’s own in another, to love another in conformity to one’s
self; but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with creative Love,
all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what in-
trinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” “Everybody
can see that the statement of St John,” Peirce goes on to say, “is the
formula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth
comes only from love, from — I will not say self-5acriyice, but from
the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest impulse.”

To extend the domain of love, we must doubtless apply fresh psy-
chological and personal insight toward promoting adventurous court-
ship, erotic fulfillment, marital harmony, parental nurture, neighborly
aid and succor. But while the renewal of all these phases of love is
vital to the more general spread of gracious and loving ways through-
out society, even this is not enough. Love is concerned, fundamentally,
with the nurture of life at every occasion: it is the practice of bestow-
ing life on other creatures and receiving life from them. Love is ego-
centric and partial until it can also embrace all the dumb creatures
who unconsciously participate in the wider scheme of life, until it be-
stows itself on those who will never thank one, because they are im-
conscious of our gift or because they are unborn; until it embraces
those who would do one injury, prompting us to treat them with dig-
nity and generosity, as warriors in reputedly more barbaric ages often
treated the enemy.

So it follows that part of our love must be expressed by our rela-
tion to all living organisms and organic structures: some of our love
must go to sea and river and soil, restraining careless exploitation and
pollution: the trees and wild creatures of the forest, the fish in the
rivers, are as subject to our affectionate care as the dogs or the cats
who live in closer dependence on us. Consider the systematic wiping
out of the natural landscape and the withdrawal from rural occupa-
tions and rural ways that took place during the past century: the
spread of megalopolitan deserts undercuts love at its very base be-
cause it removes man’s sense of active partnership and fellowship in
the common processes of growth, which bind him to other organisms.

THE WAY AND THE LIFE

287

When such habits prevail, love is reduced to a thin verbal precept not
a daily practice — a precept to be cynically disregarded on more inti-
mate occasions as well.

For social and personal integration we must develop the smdll life-
promoting occasions for love as well as the grand ones. Not a day,
then, without nurturing or furthering life: without repairing some
ficiency of love in our homes, our villages, our cities: without caring
for a child, visiting the sick, tending a garden, or making at least some
token payment of good manners on this common debt. But likewise
not a day without some more smiling expression of the delights of
love: generous evidence of what William Blake called ‘‘the lineaments
of satisfied desire.” Not just succor and service are the expressions of
love: beauty is its oldest witness.

Now beauty, as Plato taught, is the tangible proof of love: both in
its incitement and its consummation. Beauty of movement and gesture:
beauty of bodily form and costume and manner: beauty that leaps to
life in dance or song: beauty as simple people know it in their daily
life — ^the folk of Hawaii, Bali, Mexico, Brazil, or those little islands
of farmers and fisherfolk that preserve their old dances and their old
songs, full of disciplined passion, in the midst of the drably sophisti-
cated society that envelops them. By all these means, when life is not
reduced to a mechanical regimen, we make the love in our souls vis-
ible to others, courting their approval and their co-operation, moving
them by way of art into a closer union.

When Erasmus came to England he was delighted to find that the
Englishwomen of that day habitually saluted the newcomer with a
kiss, out of affectionate courtesy; and what could have been a better
proof of their sound erotic life? — a life that was to break forth, pres-
ently, into such a lyric poetry as only a woodland of mating birds
might produce. “Come live with me and be my love!” Though one
may not or can not usually carry out that invitation, it ought to
hover over the threshold of all human meetings; and where social rela-
tions are healthy^ and love itself has not become sick with denial, art
may honestly serve as surrogate for love: the social blessing bestowed
for the personal blessing withheld.

When love takes slow rise in a thousand tiny rivulets, converging
from every part of the landscape, even erotic passion will cut a deeper
channel, instead of breaking forth, as it now too often does, like a
flash flood that spreads ruin to the lovers and in a short while leaves
behind the same arid waste it had suddenly overwhelmed. Love is not

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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

simply the insidious potion, the almost morbid poison, Tristan and
Iseult found it: love, conscious and unconscious, is the daily food of
all living creatures: the means of living, the proof of their capacity
to liv^, the ultimate blessing of their life. The final criticism of West-
ern civilization, as it has developed these last four centuries, is that
ifchas produced the sterile, loveless world of the machine: hostile to
life and now capable, if modern man’s compulsive irrationalities in-
crease, of bringing all life to an end. To open the way to love, by a score
of daily acts, is the first step toward integration: not salvation merely
through orgasms, but the possibility of creative fulfillment through
an ever-widening partnership with life.

10: THE RENEWAL OF LIFE

One phase of civilization does not replace another as a unit, in the
way that a guard assigned to sentry duty takes over its post. For a
while they mingle confusedly, until a moment comes when one realizes
that the entire scene has changed and all the actors are different. So
with the internal change that will produce the new person. After a
transition period a critical point will come when it will be plain that
the new personality has at last matured and that those who wear a
different mask look oddly antiquated and are ‘‘out of the picture.”
Though the object of this change is to make possible a new drama of
culture, no one who understands the social process would pretend to
write the lines or to describe, in any detail, the action and plot; for
it is part of the very nature of the living drama that these things must
be left to the actors. If here and there, I have ventured to anticipate
the next moves, it is only because the first steps have already been
taken.

How shall one describe the balanced man and woman, considered
as an ideal type? Let me begin with a negative description. He no
longer belongs exclusively to a single culture, identifies himself with
a single area of the earth, or conceives himself as in possession, through
his religion or his science, of an exclusive key to truth; nor does he
pride himself on his race or his nationality, as if the accidents of birth
were in some way specially laudable: that democratic parody of an-
cient feudal pride. His roots in his region, his family, his neighbor-
hood will be deep, and that depth itself will be a tie with other men:
but one part of his nature stays constantly in touch with the larger

the way and the life

289

world through both his religion and his politics, and remains open to
its influences and its demands.

The balanced man has the mobility of the migratory worker of the
nineteenth century without his rootlessness: he has the friendliness
toward people of other cultures that we see most admirably in the
native Hawaiian; and with the habits so engendered goes a lessen!^
of his conceit over what is exclusively indigenous. With respect to his
own region, he observes two rules: first he cultivates every part of it to
its utmost, not merely because it is near and dear, but because it can
thus contribute its specialties and individualities to other places and
peoples; and second, when he finds his own region deficient in what is
essential for full human growth, he reaches out, to the ends of the
earth if need be, to bring into it what is missing — seeking the best and
making it his own, as Emerson and Thoreau, in little Concord, reached
out for the Hindu and Persian classics.

Into the balance of the new man, accordingly, will go elements that
are not native to his race, his culture, his region, even if the place he
identifies himself with be as large and multifarious as Europe. The
savor of his own idiosyncrasy and individuality will be brought out,
rather than lessened, by this inclusiveness. So in him the old divisions
between townsman and countryman, between Greek and barbarian,
between Christian and pagan, between native and outlander, between
Western civilization and Eastern civilization, will be softened and in
time effaced. Instead of the harsh and coarse contrasts of the past, there
will be rich fusions and blendings, with the strength and individuality
that good hybrids so often show: this one- world intermixture will but
carry further a process visible in the rise of most earlier civilizations.

The change that will produce the balanced man will perhaps occur
first in the minds of the older generation: but it is the young who will
have the audacity and courage to carry it through. In any event, the
new person is, to begin with, one who has honestly confronted his own
life, has digested its failures and been re-activated by his awareness
of his sins, and has re-oriented his purposes. If need be, he has made
public acknowledgment of such errors as involved any considerable
part of his community. What has gone wrong outside himself he ac-
cepts as part and parcel of what has gone wrong within himself: but
similarly, where in his own life he has had a fresh vision of the good
or has given form to truth or beauty, h^ is eager to share it with his
fellows.

290

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

The capital act of the new man is an assumption of responsibility:
he does not transfer the blame for his personal misfortunes to his par-
ents, his elders, his associates, his circumstances: he refuses to make
his own burden lighter by treating himself as a victim of processes
over which he could have no control, even when he has innocently
suffered: for he knows that in the moral life future intentions are
more significant than past causes. On the map that science and ob-
jective investigation supply him, he superimposes his own plan of
life. So the balanced person treats his own situation, however formid-
able or threatening, as the raw material he must master and mold.
But his humility, born of self-awareness, has another side to it: con-
fidence in his own powers of creation.

Confidence in creation: a sense of the rich potentialities of life and
of endless alternatives, beyond those that the immediate moment or
the immediate culture offers. Confidence in creation, as opposed to the
fixations, the rigidities, the narrow alternatives of the existing eco-
nomic systems and cultural schemes: yes, here precisely is the deepest
difference between the new person and the old, who gave to external
conditions and external stimuli the initiative that living organisms and
above all living persons must keep for themselves. Those who have
this confidence are not afraid to break with the existing patterns, how-
ever compulsive and authoritative they may seem; and they are not
afraid to make departures on radically different lines, merely because
they may meet with rebuff or failure. Such confidence once existed in
a high degree among the great industrialists who girdled the planet
with railroad lines, steamships, ocean cables, and factories; and those
whose task it is to build a new world on the ruins of our disintegrating
civilization must have that faith in even fuller measure. The new per-
son, because he has not feared to transform himself, is capable of
facing the world in a similar mood of adventurous amelioration.

Only those who have confronted the present crisis in all its dimen-
sions will have the strength to repent of their own sins and those of
their community, to confront and overcome the evils that threaten us,
and to re-affirm the goods of the past that will serve as foundation for
the goods of the future that we have still to create. For those who have
undergone these changes, life is good and the expansion and intensi-
fication of life is good. To live actively through every organ and still
remain whole: to identify oneself loyally with the community and yet
to emerge from it, with free choices and new goals: to live fully in
the moment and to possess in that moment all that eternity might

THE WAY AND THE LIFE

291

bring: to re-create in one’s consciousness the whole in which man lives
and moves and has his being — ^these are essential parts of the new
affirmation of life. The rest lies with God.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When
fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That
is perhaps why the young, before they have been frustrated and lame^,
have usually so little fear of death: they live by intensities that the
elderly have forgotten.

This experience of fulfillment through wholeness is the true answer
to the brevity of man’s days. The awakened person seeks to live so that
any day might be good enough to be his last. By the actuarial tables
he knows, perhaps, that his expectation of life at birth is almost three
score and ten; but he knows something more precious than this: that
there are moments of such poignant intensity and fullness, moments
when every part of the personality is mobilized into a single act or a
single intuition, that they outweigh the contents of a whole tame life-
time. Those moments embrace eternity; and if they are fleeting, it is
because men remain finite creatures whose days are measured.

When these awakened personalities begin to multiply, the load of
anxiety that hangs over the men of our present-day culture will per-
haps begin to lift. Instead of gnawing dread, there will be a healthy
sense of expectancy, of hope without self-deception, based upon the
ability to formulate new plans and purposes: purposes which, because
they grow out of a personal reorientation and renewal, will in time
lead to the general replenishment of life. Such goals will not lose
value through the changes that time and chance and the wills of other
men will work on them, in the course of their realization; nor will
the prospect of many delays and disappointments keep those who are
awakened from putting them into action at the earliest opportunity.
Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person,
provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s
further development.

Even in his most rational procedures, the balanced person allows a
place for the irrational and the unpredictable: he knows that catastro-
phe and miracle are both possible. Instead of feeling frustrated by
these uncontrollable elements, he counts upon them to quicken the
adventure of life by their very unforeseeableness: they are but part
of the cosmic weather whose daily challenge enlivens every activity.

Life is itself forever precarious and unstable, and in no manner
does it promise a tame idyll or a static eutopia: the new person, no

292

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

less than the old, will know baflBlement, tragedy, sacrifice, and defeat,
as well as fulfillment — ^but even in desperate situations he will be
saved from despair by sharing Walt Whitman’s consciousness that
battles may be lost in the same spirit that they are won, and that a
courageous effort consecrates an unhappy end. While the conditions
be confronts are formidable, the initiative nevertheless remains with
man, once he accepts his own responsibility as a guardian of life. With
the knowledge man now possesses, he may control the knowledge that
threatens to choke him: with the power he now commands he may
control the power that would wipe him out: with the values he has
created, he may replace a routine of life based upon a denial of val-
ues. Only treason to his own sense of the divine can rob the new per-
son of his creativity.

Harsh days and bitter nights may still lie ahead for each of us in
his own person, and for mankind as a whole, before we overcome the
present forces of disintegration. But throughout the world, there is a
faint glow of color on the topmost twigs, the glow of the swelling buds
that announce, despite the frosts and storms to come, the approach of
spring: signs of life, signs of integration, signs of a deeper faith for
living and of an approaching general renewal of humanity. The day
and the hour are at hand when our individual purposes and ideals, re-
enforced by our neighbors’, will unite in a new drama of life that
will serve other men as it serves ourselves.

The way we must follow is untried and heavy with difficulty; it will
test to the utmost our faith and our powers. But it is the way toward
life, and those who follow it will prevail.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As with The Condition of Man, the ground covered by this book is almost as
large as life; and a reasonably full bibliography might prove as big as the book
itself. So in obedience to my own thesis, I have confined the bibliography to a
fair sample, aiming at balance rather than exhaustiveness. Though I have occa-
sionally repeated significant books listed in The Condition of Man, many texts
are cited only there, since the two books were conceived in 1940 as a unity.

Adams, Henry: The Education of Henry Adams, Privately printed: 1907. New
York: 1918.

The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. New York: 1919.

The method was faulty; but the intuitions about the approaching age accurate and
profound.

Aldrich, Charles Roberts: The Primitive Mind and Modern Civilization; with
an Introduction by Bronislaw Malinowski and a foreword by C. G. Jung.
New York: 1931.

Though the author sets store by a very doubtful racial unconscious and a gregarious
instinct, this is a fruitful discussion of the survival of the primitive in the modern.

Alexander, F. Matthias: The Use of the Self; with an Introduction by Professor
John Dewey. London: 1932.

The Universal Constant in Living. London: 1942.

Alexander, S.: Space, Time, and Deity. 2 vols. London; 1920.

Ali, A. Yusuf: The Message of Islam; Being a Resume of the teachings of the
Qur-an; with special reference to the spiritual and moral struggles of the
human soul. London: 1940.

Sympathetic epitome.

Allport, Gordon Willard: Attitudes. In Handbook of Social Psychology, edited
by Carl Murchison. Worcester: 1935.

Personality. New York; 1937.

' Important.

Angyal, Andras: Foundations for a Science of Personality. New York: 1941.
Excellent early part, in which the author attempts a non-dualistic description of the
body-mind process, in relation to the implicated environment, though in his definition
of autonomy and homonomy as the principal trends of development the dualism im-
plicit in our language limits his analysis.

293

294 the conduct of life

Anshen, Ruth Nanda (editor) : Science and Man: Twenty-four Original Essays.
New York: 1942.

Including admirable summaries of their essential positions by Malinowski, Cannon,

Niebuhr.

Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: 1951.

A^old, Matthew: Saint Paul and Protestantism. London: 1883.

Admirable.

Babbage, Charles; The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise; a Fragment. London: 1838.
Mathematical argument for ‘‘miracles” and for design, by the redoubtable mathema-
tician who made the first practical “calculating engine” for handling complex mathe-
matical operations: the Victorian beginning of cybernetics.

Babbitt, Irving: Rousseau and Romanticism. New York: 1919.

Democracy and Leadership. New York: 1924.

The reactionary elements in Babbitt’s thought should not obscure his many salutary
insights.

Bailey, J. 0.: Pilgrims Through Space and Time; Trends and Patterns in Sci-
entific and Utopian Fiction. New York: 1947.

Bardet, Gaston: Polyphonic Organization. In News-sheet of the International
Federation for Housing and Town Planning. Amsterdam: Nov. 1950.
Outline of an organic reorganization of work, as applied to city design. See Bishop.

Barlow, Kenneth E.: The Discipline of Peace. London: 1942.

The State of Public Knowledge. London: 1946.

A physician’s original reflections on the processes of thought in our society.

Barnett, L. D.: The Path of Light; a Manual of Maha-Yana Buddhism. Wisdom
of the East Series. New York: 1909.

Barr, Stringfellow: The Pilgrimage of Western Man. New York: 1949.

Western history since 1500, focused on the emergence of world government. Curiously
omits reference to the unifying effects of missionary enterprise, trade, and political
imperialism, without which the conditions for world government would hardly have
appeared.

Barrows, John Henry (editor) : The Worleys Parliament of Religions. 2 vols.
Chicago: 1893.

An epoch-making event, recording the high point of nineteenth century universalism.

Beam, Kenneth S. (Editor) : The Family Log. With foreword by Lewis Mum-
ford. San Diego, CaL: 1948.

A pamphlet setting forth methods and objectives of making family records, on
lines suggested in chapter on The Culture of the Family in my Faith for Living.

Bergson, Henri: Creative Evolution. New York: 1913.

An original interpretation. But see Lloyd Morgan.

Bews, John William: Human Ecology. New York: 1935.

Bishop, Claire Huchet: All Things Common. New York: 1950.

Description of a new wave of producers’ co-operatives in Europe: notably the Boi-
mondau scheme.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

295

Bloch, Oscar: V om Tode: Eine Gemeinsverstandliche Darstellung. 2 vol^. Stutt-
gart: 1909.

Boole, Mary Everest: Collected Works, 4 vols. Edited by E. M. Cobham. London :
1931.

As an educator and a moralist Mrs Boole was worthy to stand alongside those other
erratic geniuses, James Hinton and Charles Peirce: minds of high originality. See espe-
cially Logic Taught by Love, Vol. II, and The Forging of Passion into Power, VoL FT.

Borgese, G. A.: Common Cause. New York: 1943.

Goliath: the March of Fascism. New York: 1937.

See Committee to Frame a World Constitution.

Borsodi, Ralph: Education and Living. 2 vols. The School of Living: Suffern,
New York: 1948.

Attempt to work out in systematic detail the precepts of the philosophy first expressed,
as criticism, in This Ugly Civilization; decentralism, household economy, self-help,
and soil regeneration.

Bradley, F. H. : ^ ppearance and Reality. London : 1893.

Classic.

Branford, Victor: Science and Sanctity. London: 1923.

Living Religions: a Plea for the Larger Modernism. London: 1924.

An attempt to find working basis of unity between Eastern and Western interpreta-
tions of religion. See also Northrop.

Breasted, James H.: The Dawn of Conscience. New York: 1939.

Origins of morality in Egypt; highly relevant.

Brinton, Crane: The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: 1938.

Brochmann, Georg: Humanity and Happiness. New York: 1950.

A human document as well as a philosophic inquiry into the paradoxical nature and
terms of happiness. Recommended.

Brownell, Baker: The Philosopher in Chaos. New York: 1941.

The Human Community. New York: 1950.

Buber, Martin: 1 and Thou. First ed. 1923. Edinburgh: 1937. ,

Already something of a classic: on the need for recognizing the intimate and the per-
sonal in social relations.

Between Man and Man. London: 1947.

Further application of the *T-and-Thou” principle: particularly notable in two essays
on education, and in the philosophical “anthropology” essay. What Is Man?

Bucke, Richard: Cosmic Consciousness; a Study in the Evolution of the Human
Mind. New York: 1901.

Burckhardt, Jacob: Force and Freedom; Reflections on History. New York; 1943.
Translation of the W eltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ably edited by James Nichols.
For the depth of his intuitions, as well as for the scope of his thought, Burckhardt
stands first among the modern philosophers of history. Even his errors were fertile:
witness the effect of his mainly erroneous conception of the Renascence in stirring up
scholarly effort in this department. But his truths were too profound to be assimilated
by the archivists and historiographers, who dismissed him, in his own lifetime, for not
interrupting his original sentences in order to cross his t’s. See also Henry Adams and
Spengler.

296

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Burrow, Trigant: The Social Basis of Consciousness; a Study in Organic Psy-
chology Based upon a Synthetic and Societal Concept of the Neuroses,
New York; 1927,

The Neurosis of Man; an Introduction to the Science of Human Behavior,
New York; 1949.

An attempt to explain the radical defects of civilization as the result of the departure
from the natural whole responses of the organism to the partial responses focused in
an I-Persona. This thesis is put forward in a private, I-Persona vocabulary which con-
tains some 69 private new terms. An attempt to find an elementalist clue to disorders
•which must be sought on higher levels. But no one who feels impelled to accept the
thesis of The Conduct of Life should avoid testing its weaknesses against Dr Bur-
row’s counter-thesis.

Bury, J. B. : The Idea of Progress, London: 1920.

Butler, Samuel: Life and Habit. First ed. London: 1877.

An early statement of the possible relation between habit, instinct, and biological in-
heritance. Long discredited in conventional scientific circles, because it explains the
“simple” in terms of the complex, it will probably rank as a primitive classic in the
organic science that is stiU to emerge. See Schrodinger.

Unconscious Memory: First ed. London: 1880. Re-issued London: 1922,
Follows up the trail opened in Life and Habit by reference to work of Hartmann on
the Unconscious; anticipates the later concepts of the mneme by Semon. See Marcus
Hartog’s introduction on the significance of Butler’s work to biological science, now
acknowledged by many eminent biologists.

Campbell, Lewis and Garnett, W. : Life of James Clerk Maxwell. London: 1882.

Cantril, Hadley: The ^Why” of Man’s Experience. New York: 1950.

Draws heavily on the experiments and interpretations of Adelbert Ames on the nature
of sensations and perceptions. See La'wrence.

Cassirer, Ernst: An Essay on Man; An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human
Culture. New Haven; 1944.

Casson, Stanley: Progress and Catastrophe; an Anatomy of Human Adventure.
New York: 1937.

Modest but penetrating.

Channing, William EUery; Channing Day by Day. Boston: 1948.

Selections from* writings of a great Christian universalist, alert to the dangers of
statism and nationalism.

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith: What’s Wrong with the World. London: 1904.

Child, Charles M.: The Physiological Foundations of Behavior. New York; 1924.

Chrow, Lawrence B. and Loos, A. William (Editors) : The Nature of Man; His
World; His Spiritual Resources; His Destiny. New York (The Church
Peace Union) : 1950.

Synopsis of series of lectures from scholars in many fields, aiming to present a unified
view of man.

Chuang Tzu: Musings of a Chinese Mystic; Selections from the Philosophy of
Chuang Tzu. In Wisdom of the East Series. London: 1906.

A text, mainly Taoist, at which various hands have been at work. See Hughes, E. R.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 297

Coates, J. B.: The Crisis of the Human Person; Some Personalist Interpretations.
London: 1949.

Study of a group of writers, allied to personalism or, like James Burnham, antaconistic
to its principles. i

Coghill, G. E. Anatomy and the Problems of Behavior, Cambridge: 1929.
Important. Corrective of the simplism of the Watsonian “behaviorists.”

Collingwood, Robin George: Speculum Mentis; or. The Map of Knowledge.
Oxford: 1924.

An Autobiography. New York: 1939.

Perspicuous on the neutral, self-deflating academicism of British and American
Philosophy.

Religion and Philosophy, London: 1916.

Penetrating: more important than many later hooks on same theme.

Committee to Frame a World Constitution, The: Preliminary Draft of a World
Constitution. Chicago: 1949.

One of several score postwar efforts: probably in every way the most significant,
through the quality of mind at work and the realistic grasp and imaginative insight
shown in attacking some of the most difficult problems: above all, the needful balance
and dispersion of power, for which the Committee presents a striking solution. The
result of two years’ effort, and continued application in the current review, Common
Cause. Highly recommended.

Confucius: The Analects of Confucius, Translated and annotated by Arthur
Waley. London: 1938.

Conklin, Edwin Grant: The Direction of Human Evolution. New York: 1921.
Man, Real and Ideal; Observations and Reflections on Man’s Nature, Devel-
opment and Destiny. New York: 1943.

Cooley, Charles Horton: Life and the Student; Roadside Notes on Human Na-
ture, Society, and Letters. New York: 1927.

The life wisdom of a great American sociologist.

Coster, Geraldine: Yoga and Western Psychology. London: 1934.

Cranston, Ruth: World Faith; the Story of the Religions of the United Nations.
New York: 1949.

Croce, Benedetto: History as the Story of Liberty. London: 1921.

The Conduct of Life. New York: 1924.

Vitiated by the author’s dualism between the practical and the esthetic. The moral
and the political are not organically reconciled by his Hegelisms.

Politics and Morals. New York: 1945.

Curtis, Lionel: Civitas Dei. 3 vols. London: 1934-1937.

A compendium of history seen as the growth of commonwealth. Final hope for world
government via an English-speaking union to begin with.

D’Arcy, M. C., SJ.: The Mind and Heart of Love; Lion and Unicorn; a Study
in Eros and Agape. New York: 1947.

Excellent, with a double illumination from analytic psychology and Christian theology.
Das, Bhagavan: The Essential Unity of All Religions. Second ed, enlarged.
Benares: 1939.

Significant and useful.

298 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Davies, Blodwen, and Reiser, Oliver L, Planetary Democracy: an Introduction
to Scientific Humanism and Applied Semantics. New York: 1944.

A little naive, but headed in the right direction.

Dewey, John: Moral Principles in Education. New York: 1909.

Rejects teaching about morals in favor of situational moral decisions. Hence it takes
for granted the validity of existing conventions and principles so applied. In this little
book of an early date both the strength and weakness of Dewey’s philosophy are
neatly revealed.

Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: 1920.

Human Nature and Conduct; an Introduction to Philosophy. New York: 1922.

Excellent.

Experience and Nature. Chicago: 1925.'

The Quest for Certainty; a Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action.

(Gifford Lectures.) New York: 1929.

A Common Faith. (The Terry Lectures.) New Haven: 1934.

The Problems of Men. New York: 1946.

Collected essays relating to the central themes of Dewey’s thought: democracy, educa-
tion, logic, and value.

Dilthey, Wilhelm: Gesammelte Schriften. 11 vols. Leipzig: 1921-1936.

See especially Bde. 2 and 5-6. Cf. Hodges. Though Dilthey had no formative effect
on my own thought or that of Ortega y Gasset, our late discovery of him brought
the pleasure of confirmation.

Doman, Nicholas: The Coming Age of World Control. New York: 1942.

Driesch, Hans: Man and the Universe. New York: 1929.

Mind and Body. New York: 1927.

Drummond, Henry: Natural Law in the Spiritual World. New York: 1887.
Ellis, Havelock: The Dance of Life. New York: 1923.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Essays: First Series. Boston: 1841.

Essays: Second Series. Boston: 1844.

The Conduct of Life. Boston: 1860.

Society and Solitude. Boston: 1870.

The essay on Domestic Life is classic.

Journals: 10 vols. Boston: 1908.

Among the handful of moralists who have affected Western culture, and who may
continue to affect it, I would rank Emerson — pace Matthew Arnold! —higher than
Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius: for his crystalline vision and his sense of life’s capacity
for self -renewal. But it is impossible to choose among his works: his best passages are
everywhere. There is little that is healthy in Nietzsche that was not first expressed in
Emerson, whose influence Nietzsche acknowledged. Not the least important of his
thoughts are those that were left over in his Journals.

Farquhar, J. N.: Modern Religious Movements in India. New York: 1924.

Fitzpatrick, Edward A. (Editor) : St. Ignatius and the Ratio Studiorum. New
York: 1933.

Flewelling, Ralph Tyler; The Survival of Western Culture. New York: 1943.
Recommended. Flewelling used the term “personalism” to characterize his philosophy
long before Mounier.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

299

Fliigel, J. C.; Man, Morals and Society. London: 1945.

Forman, Henry James: The Story of Prophecy in the Life of Mankind from
Early Times to the Present Day. New York: 1936.

Fouillee, Alfred J. E.: Morale de^ I dees Forces. Paris: 1908.

Frank, Waldo: The Re-Discovery of America. New York: 1929.

Penetrating interpretation and prophecy: a challenge that met no response from tL^
generation it addressed. Almost alone in his generation in America, Waldo Frank
understood from the first the mission of religion: not as a genteel archaism that prom-
ises salvation from Wasteland, but as a living experience.

Chart for Rough Waters. New York: 1940.

South American Journey. New York: 1944.

Frank’s interpretation of the organic contribution of more “primitive” cultures —
often more highly developed in values than our own — ^is uniquely good.

Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams. London: 1913.

Probably Freud’s most original and significant work.

The Future of an Illusion. London: 1928.

Discussion of what Freud means by religion; so arbitrary that even close disciples,
like Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, reject it. See Jung.

Civilization and Its Discontents: New York: 1930.

Exposition of Freud’s theory of an instinct toward destruction and death, to account
for the aggressiveness of man and the transposition of that aggressiveness into moral
conduct. Suggestive but superficial.

New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: 1933.

A re-statement of his whole psychological position.

An Outline of Psychoanalysis. New York: 1949.

Translation of the 1940 German edition: a final testament that does not alter Freud’s
original position.

Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: 1942.

Man for Himself; an Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. New York: 1947.
Psychoanalysis and Religion. New Haven: 1950.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand: Gandhis Autobiography. Washington: 1948.
Gardiner, H. M.: Feeling and Emotion; a History of Theories. New York: 1937.
Geddes, Patrick: The Anatomy of Life. In Sociological Review. Jan. 1927.

Geddes, Patrick, and Thomson, J. Arthur: Life; Outlines of Biology. New
York: 1931.

A rich compendium, both of biological science, and of the authors’ fundamental philos-
ophy of life in all its dimensions.

Geisser, Franz: Mo Ti: Der Kiinder der Allgemeinen Menschenliebe. Berne: 1947.
Excellent study of Mo Ti and afliliated thinkers in the development of a study of the
universal ethics of humanity.

Ghose, Aurohindo (Sri Aurobindo) : The Life Divine. 2 vols. in 3. Calcutta:
1939-1940.

Giedion, Sigfried: Mechanization Takes Command. New York; 1948.

An original study of remarkable scholarly acuity and a wealth of concrete detail never
before systematically put together, but with a certain underlying ambiguity of evalu-
ation, See Mumford: Technics and Civilization.

300 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Gillin, John: The Ways of Men; an Introduction to Anthropology. New York:
1948.

Particularly good on the biological and psychological side. See Kroeber, Linton,
M#ilinowski.

Goldstein, Kurt: Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology, Cambridge,
Mass.: 1940.

An holistic study by an eminent brain specialist, emphasizing abstraction, freedom,
and self-restriction as essential characteristics of human conduct at its higher levels.

The Organism. New York: 1939.

Graham, Michael: Human Needs. London: 1951.

A biologist’s analysis of those long-established habit-patterns that condition man’s
further development. Full of human insight and sense.

Gratry, A.: La Morale et la Loi d^histoire, 2 vols. Paris: 1874.

Logic, Chicago: 1946.

Regarded by Boole as a classic contribution on the subject; particularly notable be-
cause of the human insight shown into the actual discipline and hygiene of the mind.
Highly recommended.

Gray, Alexander: The Socialist Tradition; Moses to Lenin. New York: 1946.

Guerard, Albert Leon: A Short History of the International Language Move-
ment. London: 1922.

Best introduction to this subject.

Haldane, J, S.: Mechanism, Life, and Personality: an Examination of the
Mechanistic Theory of Life and Mind. New York: 1921.

Exposition of the inadequacies of the mechanistic postulates and an excellent state-
ment of a philosophic basis of personalism long before Mounier’s school of person-
alists was heard from. But Haldane’s subjective idealism vitiates his statement. The
author is not to be confused with his brilliant but less profound — ^to speak kindly —
Marxian son.

The Sciences and Philosophy, New York: 1930.

Gifford lectures elaborating the philosophy set forth in Mechanism, Life, and Person-
ality. Unfortunately, in reacting against the misplaced materialism of conventional sci-
ence, Haldane espouses an equally indefensible idealism that holds that “the real
universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.” If
real means “actual” this is nonsense.

Halliday, James L.: Psychosocial Medicine. New York: 1948.

Analysis of psychosomatic disorders in contemporary civilization, showing contradictions
between rising physical and lowered psycho-social health. Needs further expansion in
detail.

Harrison, Jane Ellen: Ancient Art and Ritual. New York: 1922.

Brief but important.

Haskell, Edward H., Wade, Burton, and Pergament, Jerome: Co-Action Com-
pass; A General Conceptual Scheme Based Upon the Independent Sys-
tematizafdon of Co-actions Among Plants by Cause, Animals by Haskell,
and Men by Moreno, Lundberg, Honing and Others. New York: 1948.
Compare Geddes’s diagrams in Life; Outlines of Biology. Vol. H.

Heard, Gerald: Is God Evident? New York: 1948.

Essay in Natural Theology: all the better because the author attempts to do justice
to Hindu as well as Christian insights. Possibly the best of Heard’s hooka.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

301

Heard, Gerald: Is God in History? An Inquiry into Human and Prehuman
History, in Terms of the Doctrine of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. New
York: 1950.

Unconvincing. For the more classic, Christian view, see the works of Reiniiold Nie-
buhr, especially The Nature and Destiny of Man.

Heidegger, Martin: Existence and Being. London: 1949.

Four essays in logomachy, with a long introduction by Werner Brock.

Henderson, Lawrence J.: The Order of Nature. Cambridge: 1925.

Contains Clerk-Maxwell’s paper on Singular Points.

The Fitness of the Environment. New York: 1924.

Classic.

Herrick, C. Judson: Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior. New York:^
1924.

Brains of Rats and Men; a Survey of the Origin and Biological Significance
of the Cerebral Cortex. Chicago: 1926.

Hindu Scriptures: Hymns from the Rigveda, Five U panishads, the Bhagavadgita.
Edited by Nicol Macnicol. London: 1938.

One of the most useful editions of the Hindu classics; though I prefer other transla-
tions of the Gita.

Hinton, James: Man and His Dwelling Place; an Essay Towards the Interpret
tation of Nature. London: 1861.

Life in Nature. First ed. 1862. London: 1932.

The Mystery of Pain; a Book for the Sorrowful. New York: 1872.

Flashes of great intuitive insight, by a thinker whose central thoughts are closer to
our time than they were to his own.

Hobhouse, Leonard T. : Development and Purpose; an Essay Towards a Philos-
ophy of Evolution. London: 1913.

Important. Though the argument is not always adequately illustrated and carried
through, the main lines of it are admirable and the date is notable. See Urban and
Janet.

The Rational Good. London: 1921.

Hocking, William Ernest: Human Nature and Its Remaking. First ed. 1918.
New Haven: 1923.

Uneven in texture and over-influenced perhaps by the then current psychology of in-
stincts; but remarkably sound in its essentials. Compare with Marxian doctrine that
human nature is made and re-made by self-determined economic institutions.

The Self; Its Body and Freedom. New Haven: 1928.

One of the best philosophic discussions of this subject.

Living Religions and a World Faith. New York: 1940.

Excellent discussion of the local and universal tendencies in religion, with an un-
usual grasp of the significance of the non-Christian faiths. See Sdderblom.

Hodges, H. A.: Wilhelm Dilthey; an Introduction. London: 1944.

Good.

Holding, Harald: The Philosophy of Religion, London: 1914.

Homans, George C.: The Human Group. New York: 1950.

Utilizes case liistories and contemporary studies to carry further the original work
of Charles Horton Cooley. The perspicuous formulation of theory further validates
the direct data.

302 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Hopkins, E. Washburn: Origin and Evolution of Religion, New Haven: 1923.

Better than Salomon Reinach’s Orpheus.

Hoyle, Fred: The Nature of the Universe. Oxford: 1950.

BBC talks by a mathematical physicist giving most recent astronomical picture of the
universe. On his interpretation the universe, so far from running down, is in a con-
stant state of creation — out of nothing.

Hughes, E. C.: Personality Types and The Division of Labor. In American
Journal of Sociology. Vol. 33: 1928.

Hughes, E. R. (editor and translator) : Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times.
New York: 1942.

An excellent selection, beginning with the Book of Odes and presenting the very es-
sence of Confucianism and Taoism in a series of generous selections. Indispensable.

Huizinga, Jan: Homo Ludens; a Study of the Play Element in Culture. Lon-
don: 1949.

Philosophic discussion of function of play as an essential characteristic of man.

Hutchins, Robert M. See C(?mmittee to Frame a World Constitution.

Huxley, Aldous: The Perennial Philosophy. New York: 1945.

Selections and commentary on the religious interpretation of life, mainly from the
mystical side.

Huxley, Julian S.: Evolutionary Ethics. Oxford: 1943.

Man Stands Alone. New York: 1941.

Jaeger, Werner: Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture. 3 vols. New York: 1939-
1944.

Profound study of education in the most comprehensive sense, derived from the ex-
perience and thought of the most educated people in history. Not least valuable be-
cause of its presentation of remoter thinkers and poets like Hesiod and Tyrtaeus. In-
dispensable.

James, William: Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: 1912.

The best of James as philosopher.

Pragmatism. New York: 1909.

And the worst.

The Will to Believe. New York: 1897.

See especially the final pages of the final essay.

Janet, Paul (Alexandre Rene) : Final Causes. Edinburgh: 1878.

One of the best nineteenth century discussions, which won the approbation of such
a keen thinker as Professor Robert Flint, who wrote an introduction for this translation.
The Theory of Morals. New York: 1892.

Janet, Pierre; Psychological Healing; a Historical and Clinical Study. 2 vols.
New York; 1925.

A scholarly, many-sided survey of the various contradictory arts for treating mental
diseases.

Jennings, Herbert Spencer: The Universe and Life. New Haven: 1933.

Philosophic testament of a great biblogist. See J. S. Haldane, Lloyd Morgan, Pat-
rick Geddes, et aL

Jespersen, Otto: Language; Its Nature, Development and Origin. New York:
1921,

Profound scholarship plus human insight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

303

Johnson, Martin: Art and Scientific Thought; Historical Studies Towards a
Modern Revision of Their Antagonism. London: 1944.

Johnson, Wendell: People in Quandaries; the Semantics of Personal Adjustment.
New York: 1946.

Application of Korzybski’s semantic teaching to psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav: Psychological Types; or The Psychology of Individuation.
New York: 1923. ^

Now famous division of types according to attitude and function.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: 1933.

Psychology and Religion. New Haven: 1938.

The Integration of the Personality. New York: 1939.

Kafka, Franz: The Trial. New York: 1937.

Fantasy of frustration of individual person in an impersonal and compulsive civilization.
Classic expression of the plight of the person today.

Kahler, Erich: Man the Measure. New York: 1945.

A distinguished work of interpretation. Dr Kahler is now working on a study that
should prove of great importance: on singular and non-repeating events in nature and
history.

Kallen, Horace M.: Why Religion? New York: 1927.

Anti-church; yet with true insight into the positive role of religion.

The Liberal Spirit. Ithaca, N. Y.: 1948.

Kant, Immanuel: Perpetual Peace; a Philosophical Essay (1793). London:
1903.

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, (Selections from The
Critique of Practical Reason.) New York: 1932.

Kidd, Benjamin; Social Evolution. New York: 1894.

One of the first sociological studies to weigh the importance and lasting significance
of religion in society.

Kierkegaard, S^ren; The Works of Love. First ed. 1848. Princeton: 1949.

Fear and Trembling. First ed. 1921. Princeton: 1941.

Kluckhohn, Clyde: Mirror of Man. New York: 1950.

Kluckhohn, Clyde, and Murray, Henry A. (eds.) : Personality in Nature, Soci-
ety, and Culture. New York: 1948.

Excellent collection of recent essays with an important outline chapter on the concep-
tion of Personality by the authors. See Murphy, Gardner, and Allport, Gordon.

Koehler, Wolfgang; Place of Value in a World of Facts. New York: 1938.

Admirable in intention; but the very title shows how difficult it is for one bred in the
scientific tradition to re-state the problem.

Koestler, Arthur: Insight and Outlook; an Inquiry into the Common Founda-
tions of Science, Art, and Social Ethics. New York; 1949,

A usually able, sometimes brilliant, improvisation; but still an improvisation.

Kolnai, Aurel: The War Against the West. New York: 1938.

The best critical compendium of National Socialist thought, both the relatively sane
and the downright insane, to date. Not to be overlooked on the assumption that the
physical defeat of Germany brings Nazism to an end.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

304

Korzybski, Alfred: Manhood of Humanity; the Science and Art of Human En-
gineering. New York: 1921.

Once extremely popular; but both naive and dated. The concept of a man as a time-
binding animal put into a striking phrase an already familiar sociological concept.
But see Science and Sanity.

Science and Sanity: an Introduction to N on- Aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics. Science Press, Lancaster: 1941.

Original and important work. The first book I know to do adequate justice to the
levels of meaning, including the unspeakable levels, to the multi-ordinal dimensions
of every sign and symbol, and to the internal as well as the external aspects of objec-
tivity. Unfortunately, Korzybski, in departing from Aristotelian logic, did not develop
his system to a point at which he could include it in a fuller unity.

Kroeber, A. L.: Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley: 1944.

Significant analysis of the nature of culture growth. All the more valuable because
made independent of the findings of Sorokin and Toynbee.

Anthropology — Race; Language; Culture; Psychology; Prehistory. New
York: 1948.

Originally written in 1923, the present work has been completely re-written and radi-
cally improved. In scholarship, in critical judgment, in philosophical breadth by far
the best single study of man and his works that has appeared, with a vein of refresh-
ing originality threading through the descriptions and generalizations. The summation
of the life work of a great scholsir, endowed with wisdom as well as science.

Kropotkin, Peter: Memoirs of a Revolutionist. New York: 1899.

To be put beside Herzen and Gandhi.

Mutual Aid; a Factor of Evolution. First ed. London: 1902.

Written as reply to T. H. Huxley’s Nineteenth Century article on The Struggle for
Existence (1888). Presents evidence of co-operative factors, deplorably absent from
Victorian business, but obvious both in human history and animal development. By
this classic statement and his equally original Fields, Factories and Workshops,
Kropotkin established himself as one of the great seminal thinkers of our time: per-
haps capable of counteracting Marx’s sinister emphasis on authority, mechanism, and
violence.

Ethics; Origin and Development. New York: 1924.

Historical study on which Kropotkin was working at the time of his death. Unfor-
tunately, it lacks his own special contribution to the subject, except by way of criti-
cism of the classical ethical theories.

Krutch, Joseph Wood: The Modern Temper; a Study and a Confession. New
York: 1929.

A dignified rationalization of the despair and emptiness of our time: itself a classic
expression of the Wasteland period. Useful as a balance to those who might take the
philosophy of the present book too one-sidedly.

Langer, Suzanne K.: Philosophy in a New Key; A Study in the Symbolism of
Reason, Rite, and Art. New York: 1942.

Brilliant, penetrating, often original, always provocative. Available now in Mentor
edition.

Lao-Tse: Too Teh Ching: The Way of Life. Translated by Witter Bynner. New
York: 1944.

Classic statement of life according to nature, with a maximum of spontaneity and
freedom. This translation is perhaps over-polished: see E. R. Hughes.

Lawrence, Merle: Studies in Human Behavior; a Laboratory Manual. Prince-
ton: 1949.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

305

Attempt to establish basic principles of individual and group behavior with emphasis
on perception: so far the most satisfactory exposition and development of Adelbert
Ames’s far-reaching experiments and interpretation on “sensation,” a work which
thoroughly undermines the whole conception of a world built up on the basis of
“pure” sensation, from Hume onward. ^

Lecky, William E. H. : The Map of Life; Conduct and Character, London: 1899. ~
Mediocre though well-intentioned. MacDougall drew on it for a somewhat better hook
on character.

Lee, Vernon (Viola Paget) : Gospels of Anarchy, London: 1908.

Perspicuous analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century prophets, from Emerson to
Wells.

Althea: Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties, London: 1910.

Lenin, Nicolai: Selected Works, New York: 1938. Vol. V: Imperialism and Im-
perialist War,

Based on pre-1914 interpretation; and historically inept — despite its wide popularity
in communist and even liberal circles — ^in its inability to interpret the retreat from
imperialism into isolationism which characterized the dominant capitalist states during
this period. The wide parrot-like acceptance of Lenin’s thesis long common even in
non-Marxian circles only emphasizes the current need for a revaluation of both the
facts and the theories of imperialist enterprise. See Hannah Arendt.

Vol. XI: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,

Upholds orthodox Marxism in interpreting the facts of current science, against Mach
and the Neo-sensationists. Though Lenin’s metaphysics is of the soapbox variety, which
causes him to reject arbitrarily any point of view other than the Marxian, some of his
blows against the Machians are well aimed.

Lepley, Ray (Editor) : Value; A Cooperative Inquiry, New York: 1949.

Lewin, Kurt: A Dynamic Theory of Personality. Selected Papers, New York:
1935.

Lewis, C. S.: The Problem of Pain. London: 1940.

Linton, Ralph: The Study of Man; an Introduction. New York: 1936.

An excellent summary; with a weather eye on the future that has too often been
lacking in American sociological analysis. See also Kroeber, Gillin, and Malinowski.
(Perspicuously dedicated, incidentally, “To the Next Gvilization.”)

Loewenlhal, Max: Life and Soul: Outlines of a Future Theoretical Physiology
and of a Critical Philosophy, London: 1934.

MacDougall, William: Character and the Conduct of Life, New York: 1927.
Practical counsel from a good psychologist but open to much revision even on medical
matters.

Mackail, J. M.: Life of William Morris, 2 vols. New York: 1899.

MacMurray, John: Reason and Emotion. London: 1935.

Important,

The Structure of Religious Experience, New Haven: 1936.

Maitra, Sushil Kumar: The Ethics of the Hindus, Calcutta: 1925.

Major, H. D. A.: Basic Christianity; the World Religiori, London: 1945.

To arrive at a creed simple enough to unite with other religions Mr Major empties
Christianity of its historic meanings.

306

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Malinowski, Bronislaw: Freedom and Civilization. New York: 1944.

Magic, Science and Religion. Boston : 1948.

Admirable.

Mann,* Thomas : Past Masters and Other Papers. New York: 1933.

Mannheim, Karl: Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction; Studies in
Modern Social Structure. New York: 1940.

Diagnosis of Our Time. New York: 1944.

Maritain, Jacques: True Humanism. London: 1939.

Ransoming the Time. New York: 1941.

Includes an excellent series of essays on Bergson’s metaphysics.

The Rights of Man and Natural Law. New York: 1943.

Application of personalism to constitutional law.

The Person and the Common Good. New York: 1947.

Marrett, Robert R.: Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion. New York:
1932.

Head, Heart and Hands in Human Evolution. London: 1935.

Good.

Marvin, F. S. (Editor): The Evolution of World Peace. Oxford: 1921.

A volume in the well-conceived Unity Series, which uttered some of the best insights
and hopes of the twentieth century, without suj0&cient anticipation of the forces of
barbarism whose existence Spengler had already ominously pointed to. As in most
other discussions of the subject of unity, neither technology nor imperialism are ade-
quately canvassed, or indeed here canvassed at all. See H. G. Wells.

May, Rollo: The Springs of Creative Living. New York: 1940.

Meaning of Anxiety. New York: 1950.

Mead, George Herbert: The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Charles W. Morris.
Chicago: 1938.

Mead was surely one of the most original thinkers of his generation; but, being an
oral communicator, he has been saved from oblivion mainly by the activity of his stu-
dents. His work on roles, symbols, and forms of communication in development of
self is classic.

Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick. New York: 1851.

Pierre; or. The Ambiguities. New York: 1852.

A badly developed but significant novel, packed vdth distraught wisdom.

Montague, William Pepperell: Belief Unbound; a Promethean Religion for the
Modern World. New Haven: 1930.

Lucid statement of the naturalistic grounds for both religion and ethics, honestly fac-
ing the impossibility of reconciling an all-loving with an all-powerful God, yet show-
ing the grounds for believing in an ^‘ascending force, a nisus, a thrust toward con-
centration, organization, and life.” William James’s looser statement of this position,
and Alexander’s more comprehensive but more abstract work on Deity lack the pre-
cision and force of Montague’s.

Moore, George Edward: Principia Ethica. First ed. 1903. Cambridge: 1929.
Reduces ideal good to esthetic enjoyment, personal affection, and true knowledge.
In preface Moore apologized for leaving out all consideration of purpose and end
but he never rectified that omission. Influential through its weaknesses: otherwise
sterile.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

307

More, Paul Elmer; The Skeptical Approach to Religion, Princeton; 1934.

Moreno, Jacob L.; Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Hu-
man Interrelations, Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 58.
Washington; 1934. *

An ingenious approach to exact observation in the psychological behavior of men in
groups: an attempt to establish an ecology of the psyche.

Psychodrama. VoL I. New York; 1946.

Original.

Morgan, C. Lloyd; Habit and Instinct. New York; 1896.

One of the earliest and happiest works of this philosophic biologist, but without the
originality and the epistemological and verbal hurdles of his later volumes. Though
there is no indication of his being influenced by Samuel Butler, he shared many of
the latter’s insights and brought to them the authority of an experimental scientist.
Emergent Evolution, New York; 1923.

Li/e, Mind, and Spirit, New York: 1926.

The second course of The Gifford Lectures, delivered under the general title of Emer-
gent Evolution; and, with Wheeler’s brief exposition, the most satisfactory statement,
in strictly natural history terms, of the general doctrine of emergence.

Mind at the Crossways, New York; 1930.

Closely reasoned presentation of the^ psychological and epistemological problems raised
by the author’s general philosophy.

Morris, Charles W.; The Paths of Life. New York; 1942.

Important in outline if not in development.

The Open Self. New York: 1948.

Re-statement of ideas expressed in Paths of Life, in terms of the self. See Hocking
for a more comprehensive and on the whole sounder treatment of the same problem.

Mounier, Emmanuel: A Personalist Manifesto. New York: 1938.

Central but not altogether satisfactory exposition.

The Present Tasks of Personalism. Personalist Pamphlets. No. 4. London:
n.d.

Existentialist Philosophies: an Introduction. London; 1948.

A useful Baedeker, which should convince the intelligent that there is no reason to
take the journey. For those who will not be convinced, see Heidegger, Sartre, Wahl.

Muller, Hermann J.: Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future. New
York; 1935.

Mumford, Lewis: The Story of Utopias. New York: 1926.

The Golden Day; a Study of American Experience and Culture. New York:
1926.

What I Believe. An essay in Living Philosophies, New York: 1930.

Faith for Living. New York: 1940.

An attempt to give a debunked and self-devaluated generation an elementary under-
standing of the things men live and die for; the universal things, like Justice, Liberty,
Truth, and the elemental primary things, like family, region, home. See Beam.
Values for Survival; Essays on Politics and Education. New York: 1946.
Includes the controversial essay on The Corruption of Liberalism first published in
the New Republic in 1940 . The last third of the book' consists of a series of Letters
to Germans, written originally at the request of the Ofldice of War Information, after
Germany had been conquered, and scheduled by them for German publication. When
the Army took over, publication in Germany was denied. This singular policy was

308

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

doubtless the result of indoctrination in that school of German thought which assumed
that Nazism was only a passing episode in German life. This illusion, fostered by those
who too often exercised influence over Army education, is in no small part responsible
for the radical mistakes the American government has made — and is still making — ^in
rdation to Germany.

Mumford, Lewis-: The Social Consequences of Atomic War. In Air Affairs,
Washington: March 1947.

Atomic Bomb: Miracle or Catastrophe, In Air Affairs. Washington: July 1948.
Alternatives to Catastrophe. In Air Affairs. Washington: Spring 1950.

This series of essays on the moral problems raised by the atomic bomb and the com-
mitment to genocide followed Program for Survival, which was written less than a
month after the bomb was used to exterminate the inhabitants of Hiroshima. In these
essays I endeavored to deflate the grisly romantic flights of the air force strategists,
with their irreal concept of a quick cheap victory by universal extermination; and I
brought forth a series of concrete proposals for returning to political sanity and human
morality. While the hypothetical predictions of 1947 have already been fulfilled to a
dismaying degree, their only result was an invitation to lecture at the National War
College — ^though the impression made on our military planners was not sufficient to
reverse the disastrous policy on which the United States government had embarked.
These essays, taken together, are herewith submitted as pragmatic corroboration of
the philosophy set forth in these books.

Green Memories; The Story of Geddes. New York; 1947.

Glimpses of the biographical background and human experience out of which The
Conduct of Life was written. To use current slang, this represents the existential side
of the present philosophy. More than one page in The Conduct of Life owes a debt
to my son — sometimes to his words, sometimes to his example.

Murphy, Gardner: Personality ; a Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure,
New York: 1948.

An exhaustive study, using the latest findings of the anthropologists as well as the
analytical psychologists and the personologists.

Murray, Henry A. : Explorations in Personality. New York ; 1938.

One of the best attempts to chart the depth and breadth of the human personality,
Freudian in background, but deliberately synthetic and comprehensive, not limited to
the solutions of a school. See Murphy, Gardner.

Murray, Henry A. (editor). See Clyde Kluckhohn.

Murry, Middleton: God. New York: 1929.

Myers, Frederic W. H. : Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death.
2 vols. New York: 1908.

Niebuhr, Reinhold: The Nature and Destiny of Man; a Christian Inter or elation.
2 vols. New York: 1941.

Traditional in its adherence to orthodoxy; original by reason of this adherence, which
gives the author a critical fixed point from which to detect the human aberrations of
a too guileless liberalism, a too impersonal mechanism and materialism, or a too un-
critical Marxism.

Faith and History; a Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History.
New York: 1949.

Assumes that the salvation of man cannot take place in history, since history is full
of mysteries that cannot be penetrated and contradictions that cannot be resolved:
therefore the meaning of life cannot be found there. The conclusion does not follow
from the premises; but as with all Dr Niebuhr*s other works he shows great skill in

BIBLIOGRAPHY 309

detecting flaws in his opponents* armor. All hangs on the viability of his concept of
salvation.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Genealogy of Morals; a Polemic. London: 1913.

White crystalline blocks of truth, marbled with folly: including in the latter^an at-
tempt to derive the notion of moral obligation from the universal practices of a mythi-
cal Urhdndlunggesetzmdssigkeit.

Nikhilananda, Swami: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: 1942.

Ramakrishna, almost within his own lifetime, was known as the God Man to his fol-
lowers. He is in many ways a close contemporary of Dostoyevsky’s imaginary Holy
Man in The Brothers Karamazov.

Nordau, Max: Degeneration. New York: 1895.

Appeared in 1893 in German, and caused great scandal in intellectual circles; rightly
because of coarse application of half-baked scientific doctrines to ill -observed and
maliciously interpreted “facts.” But, as with Spengler, the book had merits as intuitive
prophecy that it lacked as objective observation; the degeneration that Nordau re-
garded as mainly physiological, following Lombroso, was in fact a cultural disintegra-
tion whose results we have lived to see.

Northrop, F. S. C. (editor) : Ideological Differences and World Order. New
Haven: 1949.

Uneven in value.

The Meeting of East and West. An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding.
New York: 1946.

Spirit and purpose excellent: method wooden: results uneven. Despite these reser-
vations an important book.

Noiiy, Lecomte du: Human Destiny. New York: 1947.

Advocates a doctrine of “telefinalism” as against the improbability of a world gov-
erned by chance producing as much order and direction as we find in the biological
world and finally in man. Important as an indication of a new wind blowing in science;
but unconvincing at many points because of a certain arbitrariness and over-confi-
dence on such difiScult matters as the correct way of inculcating morality,

Nyhren, Anders: Agape and Eros; a Study of the Christian Idea of Love. 3 vols.
London: 1932.

Thoroughgoing study of the ideas contributed by the philosophers and theologians,
without any further resolution of the modes of love in human experience.

Ogden, Charles Kay: The System of Basic English. New York: 1934.

Ogden, Charles Kay, and Richards, I. A.: The Meaning of Meaning: a Study of
the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.
New York: 1923.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Toward a Philosophy of History. New York: 1941.

Ortega’s approach to history is similar to that of this series.

Concord and Liberty. New York: 1946.

The Dehumanization of Art, Princeton: 1946.

Otto, Rudolph: Idea of the Holy. London: 1923,

Ouspensky, Piotr D.: A New Model of the Universe. New York: 1943.

The Psychology of Mans Possible Evolution. New York: 1950.

Pretentiously empty.

Paget, Violet. See Lee, Vernon.

310 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Paley, William: Natural Theology, 2 vols. London: 1836.

Attempt to prove the existence of God from the evidence of design in natural history.
Weak in science because of the date but generally rejected by naturalists because of a
theology far sounder than that of their favorite Victorian Deity, Natural Selection.

Paul, Leslie: The Annihilation of Man; a Study of the Crisis in the West. New
York: 1945.

Excellent in its diagnosis of fascism; but inadequate, in the same fashion as Toynbee,
Sorokin, and Michael Roberts, in its suggestions for Renewal.

The Meaning of Human Existence. New York: 1950.

Pearl, Raymond: Man the Animal. Bloomington, Indiana: 1946.

Peirce, Charles: Chance, Love and Logic. New York: 1923.

The Philosophy of Peirce. Selected Writings. Edited by Justus Buchler. Lon-
don: 1940.

Perry, Ralph Barton: The Moral Economy. New York: 1909.

General Theory of Value; Its Meaning and Basic Principles Construed in
Terms of Interest. New York: 1926.

The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: 1935.

Persoff, Albert Morton: Sabbatical Years With Pay: a Plan to Create and Main-
tain Full Employment. Los Angeles: 1945.

A valid thesis in an age threatened with unusable leisure at the wrong end of life,
quite apart from the question of full employment.

Petrie, Maria: Art and Regeneration. London: 1946.

Excellent study of the regenerative and formative role of art in education. Cf. Herbert
Read.

Plant, James S.: Personality and the Cultural Pattern. New York: 1937.

Not merely sound psychology and sociology, but occasionally something more rare;
wisdom.

Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation. New York: 1944,

Analysis of the nature of the modern market economy and its essential impermanence.
Important; not least because it offers a satisfactory answer to the notion propounded
by Herbert Spencer, Hayek, Lippmann, and others that the free economy disappeared,
not because of its weaknesses and its sins, but because of an altogether perverse at-
tack upon it.

Prescott, Daniel A.: Emotion and the Educational Process. Washington: 1938.

Rader, Melvin: Ethics and Society; an Appraisal of Social Ideals. New York:
1950.

Useful study by a scholar whose integrity and courage give him special qualifications
to deal with this field.

Radhakdrishnan, S.: The Hindu View of Life. New York: 1927.

Excellent synoptic view of the Hindu religion and philosophy.

Indian Philosophy. 2 vols. New York: 1927.

Particularly useful because it has generous chapters on Patanjali and Sankara.

Read, Herbert: Education Through Art. New York: 1949.

Rightly esteemed by the author as his most important book to date.

Education for Peace. London: 1950.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

311

Reich, Wilhelm: The Discovery of the Orgone. Vol. I: The Function of the Or-
gasm. First ed. 1927. Second ed. New York: 1948.

What is sound in this work — the belated hut perhaps long-suspected discovery that
orgasms are important — was not original with Reich, despite his contrary impression.
(See Dr Marie Stopes’ Married Lov©.) His originality consists in prescribing the
orgastn as a panacea for the ills of mankind: the fallacy of one-dimensional salvation.

Reiser, Oliver L. : World Philosophy; a Search for Synthesis, University rf
Pittsburgh: 1948.

Reiser, Oliver L. See Davies, Blodwen.

Renouvier, Charles. Le Personnalisme. Paris: 1903.

Renouvier’s mature statement of his own philosophic postulates.

Rhine, J. B. : The Reach of Mind. New York: 1947.

Summation of the evidence presented at earlier stages in Extra-Sensory Perception
and New Frontiers of the Mind on the possibilities of clairvoyance, telepathy, and
psycho-kinesis. Unless the theory of probability is not as absolute in its workings as
mathematicians assume, the work of Dr Rhine and his associates proves that an un-
known factor, seemingly human in origin, occasionally modifies some events of a
“physical” nature. The most convincing part about the evidence is perhaps the fact
that it is so meager in quantity apd so hard to interpret.

Riesman, David (assisted by Denney, N., and Glazer, N.) ; The Lonely Crowd;
a Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: 1950.

Perceptive study of ethical sources and current ethical vacuums.

Rignano, Eugenio: The Aim of Existence; Being a System of Morality Based on
the Harmony of Life. Chicago: 1929.

The Nature of Life. New York: 1930,

Good,

Ritter, WiUiam E.: The Natural History of Our Conduct. New York: 1927.

Attempt to rectify Huxley’s misleading interpretation of discontinuity between man
and other organisms in the ethical domain. Not entirely satisfactory; but in the right
direction.

Roberts, Michael: The Modern Mind. London: 1937.

The Recovery of the West. London: 1941.

One of the best discussions of the intellectual and moral situation today. But see
Leslie Paul, L. L. Whyte, and Erich Kahler, and my own book. The Condition of Man.

Roberts, Morley: Malignancy and Evolution. London: 1926.

Rocker, Rudolph: Nationalism and Culture. New York: 1937.

Important contribution by a distinguished philosophic anarchist. For a more favorable
picture, see George Russell’s The National Being, likewise Mazzini.

Rorschach, Hermann: Psychodiagnostics; a Diagnostic Test Based on Percep-
tion. Translated. Berne, Switzerland: 1942.

Theoretic exposition of the famous test, whose remarkable efficacy, in practice, has
more than justified its author’s original hopes. See Henry A. Murray.

Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen: Out of Revolution; Autobiography of Western Man.
New York; 1938.

The Christian Future; or, The Modern Mind Outrun. New York: 1946.

A challenging statement by a highly original mind.

312 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen: The Multiformity of Man. Norwich, Vt: 1948.

Brilliant essay on the dynamics of human relations in work.

Rougemont, Denis de: The Devil’s Share. New York: 1944.

Royce, Josiah: The Philosophy of Loyalty, New York: 1908.

Excellent statement of the higher universal implications of what would be, for Berg-
son, a static and enclosed morality.

The Problem of Christianity. 2 vols. New York: 1913.

Re-statement of Christianity in terms of human experience, as the religious expression
of the “philosophy of loyalty.” Penetrating and persuasive.

The Hope of the Great Community. New York; 1916.

One of the earliest and soundest formulations of One World doctrine.

Russell, Bertrand: Mysticism and Logic. New York: 1921.

Modern statement of scientific stoicism.

Religion and Science. New York: 1935.

Russell, E. S.: The Directiveness of Organic Activities. Cambridge: 1945.

Important, but see Simpson.

Sachs, Curt: The Commonwealth of Art; Style in the Fine Arts, Music and The
Dance. New York: 1942.

Remarkable pioneer attempt at unification.

Santayana, George: Realms of Being. New York: 1942.

One-volume edition of The Realm of Essence, The Realm of Matter, The Realm of
Truth and the Realm of Spirit: in some ways the philosophic equivalent of Proust,
essentially a soliloquy that subsumes the past, tranquilly hovering over man and the
cosmos, without ever wrestling with the present or moving toward the future.

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels or God in Man; a Critical Essay. New
York: 1946.

The Life of Reason. 5 vols. New York: 1905.

Pregnant with original thoughts whose significance could not be fuUy appreciated until
the present day.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: Existentialism. New York: 1947.

A symptom disguised as a system.

Sayers, Dorothy L.: The Mind of the Maker. New York: 1941.

Original conception of both the Christian religion and creativeness, but marred by
Miss Sayers’ professional assumption, as a writer of detective stories, presumably
worked from the final solution forward, that God knew the answers before He began.

Schelling, Friedrich: The Ages of the World. Trans, with introductory notes
by Frederick DeWulfe Bolman, Jr. New York: 1942.

Schilder, Paul: Goals and Desires of Man; a Psychological Survey of Life. New
York: 1942.

Schrodinger, Erwin: Science and the Human Temperament. New York: 1935.

Brilliant summary of post-mechanistic physics.

What Is Life? New York: 1946.

A physicist’s attempt to bridge the gap between the non-organic and the organic, by
an extremely interesting application of the theory of probability to the genes of
heredity, with their relatively small number of molecules.

Schweitzer, Albert: The Philosophy of Civilisation. Vol. I: The Decay and Res-
toration of Civilisation. Vol. II: Civilisation and Ethics. London: 1923.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 313

[Vol. Ill: The World-View of Reverence for Life, Vol. IV: The Civilised
State, In preparation.]

The divorce of his reverence for life from a view of nature partly deprives it of its
natural significance and authority.

Out of My Life and Thought; an Autobiography, New York: 1933,

Indian Thought and Its Development, New York: 1936.

Compact and useful study of the life-negating Hindu ideology, by the exponent of
Western life-affirming religiousness.

Schweitzer, Albert: An Anthology. Edited by Charles R. Joy. Boston: 1947.

Seidenberg, Roderick: Post-Historic Man; an Inquiry, Chapel Hill, N. C.: 1950.
Acute study of the processes that are creating a collective automaton out of the
image of God. Puts in rational form the intuitions expressed from Erewhon to 19B4.
The author does not allow for human resiliency; or for man’s capacity to demolish
the machine itself before it takes him so far away from his proper destination. Rec-
ommended.

Sellars, Roy Wood: Evolutionary Naturalism. Chicago: 1922.

Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate: The Neighbor; The Natural History of Human
Contacts, Boston: 1904.

The Individual; a Study of Life and Death. Boston: 1901.

Both noteworthy discussions, by a mind that went far beyond its professional prov-
ince of geology.

Shand, Alexander F.: The Foundations of Character; Being a Study of the
Tendencies of the Emotions and Sentiments, London: 1920.

Sheldon, William H.: Psychology and the Promethean Will; a Constructive
Study of the Acute Common Problem of Education, Medicine, and Re-
ligion, New York: 1936.

The Varieties of Temperament. New York: 1942. .

For an early anticipation of Sheldon’s contribution see a paper by Dr J. Lionel Taylor:
The Study of Individuals (Individuology) in Sociological Papers. London: 1904.

Simpson, George Gaylord. Tempo and Mode in Evolution, New York: 1944.

The Meaning of Evolution. New Haven: 1949.

Important.

Soderblom, Nathan: The Living God; Basal Forms for Personal Religion. The
Gifiord Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in the year 1931.
London: 1933.

Pure expression of Universalism. See Hocking.

Sombart, Werner: The Quintessence of Capitalism: a Study of the History and
Psychology of the Modern Business Man. (Translation of Der Bourgeois.)
New York: 1915. ^

Though Sombart contrasts this new ideology and psychology wiA those of a wholly
mythical natural man, his characterization is often penetrating. Unlike he doM

not overplay the debt of capitalism to Protestantism. Cf. my criticism of Webers arbi-
trary interpretation in The Condition of Man.

Somerville, John; Soviet Philosophy; A Study of Theory and Practice. New

York: 1946.

314 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Sorokin, Pitirim A.: The Crisis of Our Age. New York: 1941.

Condensation of thesis on modern civilization set forth in his four-volume Social and
Cultural Dynamics (1938). Important because he was one of the first sociologists to
recognize the importance of the logico -meaningful element in all social processes.
Society f Culture, and Personality: a System of General Sociology. New York:
1947.

A compendious textbook, which brings together in reasonable order a great deal of
material and many bibliographic references.

The Reconstruction of Humanity. Boston: 1948.

Attempt at detailed prescription for overcoming the present disintegration of Western
civilization. Full of loose thinking, slipshod generalization, and pseudo-statistical proof,
and lacking in' an adequate methodology; yet its weaknesses are partly corrected by a
wide-ranging scholarship and by a generous recognition of the complicated processes
at work in society and the human personality.

Spencer, Herbert: Education; Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. First ed., Lon-
don: 1861.

Classic.

First Principles. London: 1862.

Introduction to Spencer’s magistral attempt to unify the physical, biological, and
social sciences by means of concept of evolution. The revolt against Spencer’s sys-
tem, led in the United States by William James, was not merely directed against his
weaknesses: it was the rejection by an age of chaotic specialization against any at-
tempt at a general order or synthesis.

Spr anger, Eduard: Types of Men; the Psychology and Ethics of Personality,
Trans. From fifth German ed. Halle: 1928.

Stapleton, Laurence: Justice and World Society. Chapel Hill, N. C.: 1944.

Attempt to re-establish concept of universal justice;

Steiner, Rudolph: The Threefold Commonwealth. New York: 1928.

Steiner’s conception of a threefold arrangement of political, economic, and educa-
tional life, in which the. state would have a minimum to do with economics and edu-
cation.

Study of Man; General Education Course. New York: 1947.

Theosophical interpretation of the nature of man, by the most influential theosophist
after Mrs Annie Besant. Precisely because of the freedom of hypothesis which Steiner
gave himself, he has perhaps at times discovered truths, or the beginnings of truths,
not admitted as possible by other systems. To preserve an inquiring and open mind,
if no more, such books as this, usually contemptuously ignored by scholars, should
be kept in view. Even such a flat materialist as Freud was forced, in medical honesty,
to take dreams seriously.

Stem, William: General Psychology. New York: 1938.

Stevens, Henry Bailey: The Recovery of fulture. New York: 1949.

Ingenious interpretation of history and civilization as a perversion on the part of the
meat-eating, stock-raising peoples of late neolithic times, which produced butchery
and war, supplanting the peaceful plant-raising, tree-worshiping, vegetarian culture
that preceded it. Stimulating.

Stromberg, Gustaf. The Soul of the Universe. Philadelphia: 1940.

Taylor,. Gordon Rattray: What Is Personalism? Personalist Pamphlets No.-l.
London: n.d.

Thomson, J. Arthur: The System of Animate Nature. 2 vols. New York; 1920.
WhjTt Tfi Man? London: 1924.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

315

Thoreau, Henry David; Walden, Boston: 1854.

Essay on Civil Disobedience, First published in Aesthetic Papers, edited by
Elizabeth Peabody. Boston: 1849.

Influenced Gandhi: badly needed today, particularly among many of Thoreau*s cowed
and blindly conformist countrymen.

Thorndike, Edward Lee; Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: 1940.
Copious summation of Thorndike’s life work as a psychologist, applied to probl^s
that call for wisdom as well as knowledge. Thorndike’s interpretation of purpose in
relation to the learning process offers a more radical revision of current psychology
than he himself seemed quite aware of.

Man and His Works. Cambridge, Mass.; 1943.

Brief summation of some of the data on social institutions in Human Nature and the
Social Order. Perhaps most important for the light Thorndike’s tests on reward and
punishment throw upon penology.

Tillich, Paul: The Shaking of the Foundations. New York: 1948.

Tillyard, Aelfrida; Spiritual Exercises and Their Results; an Essay in Psychol-
ogy and Comparative Religion. London; 1927.

Useful though hardly exhaustive.

Tolman, Edward Chace: Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men. New York:
1932.

Drives Toward War. New York: 1942.

Tolstoy, Leo. Works. Vol. XII; On Life and Essays on Religion. Vol. XIV:
What Then Must We Do? Vol. XVIII: What is Art? Oxford: 1928-1937.

Toynbee, Arnold: Civilization on Trial. New York: 1948,

Essays which show, perhaps more clearly than the six-volume A Study of History, the
limitations of the author’s theology and his insight into the nature of human life and
destiny.

A Study of History. Abridgement of Vols. I-VI in one volume by D. C.
Somervell.

This excellent condensation reveals more nakedly Toynbee’s essential strength and
weakness. He is like a great explorer and colonizer who returns at last to live on a
Rmnll (spiritual) pension in his ancestral village, next door to the vicarage.

Trueblood, D* Elton: The Predicament of Modern Man. New York: 1944.

Tsanoff, Radoslav A.; The Nature of Evil. New York: 1931.

Tyrell, G. N. M.: The Personality of Man. London: 1946.

Chiefly on evidence of extra-sensory activities.

Underhill, Evelyn: Mysticism; a Study in the Nature and Development of Man's
Spiritual Consciousness. London: 1911.

Urban, W. M.: Valuation; Its Nature and Laws. New York: 1909.

The Intelligible World. Metaphysics and Value. New York: 1929.

Urban’s work, with Hobhouse’s, stands among the first recent attempts, apart from
neo-Thomism, to interpret human experience in terms of value, purpose, and meaning.
Language and Reality; the Philosophy of Language and the Principles of
Symbolism. London : 1939.

Veblen, Thorstein: An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its
Perpetuation. New York: 1917,

316 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Vico, Giambattista: The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Trans, by Max
Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca, N. Y.: 1944.

Extremely revealing. Vico was not merely a great humanist in the Renascence tradi-
tion? but even more, an early precursor of a more organic and personalist philosophy.

Wallas, Graham: The Great Society. New York: 1915.

One of the landmarks that indicate how high the wave of hopeful intelligence and
intelligent hope had reached before 1914. Cf. Mannheim’s diagnosis almost a genera-
tion later.

Our Social Heritage. New Haven : 1921.

Men and Ideas. New York : 1940.

The wisdom of an educator, a civil servant, and a sociologist whose work should be
better known to the present generation. See particularly his criticism of Froebelian
pedagogy, which is also, incidentally, a criticism of Dewey’s too influential little
treatise on Interest and Effort in Education.

Wallis, Wilson D.: Messiahs; Their Role in Civilization. Washington: 1943.
Ward, James: The Realm of Ends; or. Pluralism and Theism, Cambridge: 1911.

Watts, Alan W.: The Spirit of Zen: a Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far
East. London : 1936. ,

Exposition of one of the most elusive forms of Buddhism.

W^ells, Herbert George: A Modern Utopia, London: 1905.

One of a series of Utopias, ail more or less similar in content because of the stress
"Wells laid on organization, administration and mechanical invention, which express
the best of the liberal-socialist nineteenth century ideals though tainted by a tend-
ency toward “scientific” authoritarianism.

The Shape of Things to Come; the Ultimate Revolution, New York: 1933.

The Anatomy of Frustration. New York: 1936.

Mind at the End of Its Tether. London: 1945.

Written when Wells’s mind was itself collapsing and projecting its own situation into
the world; but significantly fulfilling Chesterton’s prediction that Wells’s philosophy
must end in despair.

West, Rebecca: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; a Journey Through Jugoslavia,
2 vols. New York: 1941.

One of the richest personal interpretations of another culture in our time: a mine of
wisdom.

Weyl, Hermann: The Open World, New Haven: 1932.

Re-statement in scientific terms of the case for deity as revealed by cosmic law, toward
whose elucidation mathematics and physics offer the most useful key.

Wheeler, William Norton: Emergent Evolution and the Development of Soci-
eties, New York: 1928.

Crystalline statement of doctrine ot emergence. But see Lloyd Morgan.

Whitehead, Alfred North: Science and the Modern World. New York: 1925.

In a less private language than Process and Reality, and still one of the best exposi-
tions of Whitehead’s philosophy, though some of the logical weakness of the concept
of mechanism applies also to his concept of organism, which is no more ultimate.
Symbolism; Its Meaning and Effect, New York: 1927.

Recommended. , ,

The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New Yor(c: 1929-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

317

Whitehead, Alfred North: The Function of Reason, Princeton: 1930.

Adventures of Ideas. New York: 1933.

Whitman, Walt: Democratic Vistas. New York: 1871.

The best prose exposition of Whitman’s doctrine of Personalism which, though philo-
sophically undeveloped, intuitively grasped and anticipated the elements of later per-
sonalism. Here and in Leaves of Grass Whitman speaks for a personalism that absorbs
science and encloses it, dealing with equal readiness with internal events and^the
mere show of things: with the innermost recesses of the soul or the outermost reaches
of the cosmos: a point of view which the present series of books has consciously ex-
panded, in distinction to the narrower personalism, a variant of orthodox humanism,
which is more characteristic of the European personalists.

Whyte, Lancelot Law: The Next Development in Man. New York: 1948.

Attempt to develop a unitary philosophy capable of embracing all phenomena; but by
founding it on the Heraclitean concept of process and change the author fails to do
justice to the static and “eternar’ aspects of experience; and is therefore compelled
by his logic not only to exclude every form of Platonism but to forgo, by that very
act, the unitary goal that he regards as imperative. The concepts that underlie The
Conduct of Life seek to escape this weakness and do justice to ail the dimensions of
experience. See Spencer’s First Principles.

Wiener, Norbert: The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society.
Boston: 1950.

Admirable exposition of the social implications of the new thinking machines: their
danger and promise.

Willkie, Wendell: One World. New York: 1943.

Memorable for its title: the first formulation by a politician of the fundamental truth
of our times — that mankind is one, and that the acceptance of its unity has become
today a criterion of sanity as well as a goal of statesmanship.

Wilson, Richard A.: The Miraculous Birth of Language. New York: 1948.

Sound critique of the Darwinian and hehaviorist attempt to minimize the gap between
man and the rest of the animal world. Emphasizes the unique role of time and space
concepts in language formation. Does belated justice to Kant, but for some reason
while treating Rousseau overlooks the more important contributions of Vico; and in
our time Cassirer and Langer. Highly recommended.

Wolff, Werner: The Expression of Personality; Experimental Depth Psychology.
New York: 1943.

Wundt, Wilhelm: The Facts of the Moral Life. Trans, from second German ed.,
1892. New York: 1897.

Young, J. Z.: Doubt and Certainty in Science; A Biologists Reflections on the
Human Brain. The Reith Lectures. In The Listener, Nov. 2, 1950 to Dec.
21, 1950.

Younghusband, Francis Edward: The Living Universe. London: 1933.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is part of a growing body of thought: so my debt to other scholars
is properly an extensive one. The bibliography indicates my major sources
and occasionally gives some measure of my debts.

In my other volumes I have acknowledged an early obligation to my old
master, Patrick Geddes, and to his friend and collaborator, Victor Branford. To
make up for the neglect of Geddes’s thought by his contemporaries, I have in the
past perhaps exaggerated his efiect on my own mature thinking, though I have
often failed to take full advantage of his most original contributions. While in
the present book I have, I trust, pushed beyond the natural limitations of Geddes’s
period and culture, I should never be surprised to find the blaze of his ax on
any trail I thought to have opened alone. To my colleagues and students at
Dartmouth College, Columbia University, Stanford University, and the Univer-
sity of North Carolina I owe a debt too voluminous to record in detail. For more
strictly personal influences in the conception and gestation of this series I can
give no public acknowledgments: enough to recall Whitman’s words, “The best
is that which must be left unsaid.” To this I make one exception, for without the
generous understanding, the detached criticism, and the loyal comradeship of
my wife, Sophia Wittenberg Mumford, this whole series would never have
ripened. That debt crowns every other. — L. M.

INDEX

[Note: Titles of books and section heads,
as well as foreign words, are italicized.'!

Abbau, 73

Absolutes, mankind’s present, 165
Absolution, Freudian, 249
Abstraction, 53
importance of, 41
weakness of, 24

Abstractions, mechanism of, 42
Accident, versus purpose, 157
Accidents, place of, 70
Action, camp of, 265
Action, Stripping for, 268-273
Activities, autonomous, 282
segregation of, 187
Adam, old and new, 104
Adams, Henry, 96, 115, 149, 211, 231, 270
Adaptation, 28
Administrators, 277
Admirals, armchair, 224
Advancement of learning, 5
Advancement of Learning, The, 186
Adventure, 181, 242
Age, imperatives of our, 257
Maitreyan, 10

pressing problems of our, 192
Age, Promise of Our, 3-5
Agents, universal, 238
Aggression, 285
Ahab, Captain, 16, 53, 157
Ahriman, 73
Air, importance of, 141
Ajanta caves, 80, 119
Alberti, L. B., 184
Alchemists, 89
Alexander the Great, 101
Alexander. Matthias, 247, 250

Alienation, 100
social, 124

Alternatives, Present, 18-21
Ambiguities, The, 165
America, misguidance of, 172
American Jungle, the, 15
American Revolution, 210
American soldier, moral insight of, 156
American way of life, 125
Ames, Adelbert, 40
Amoeba, 122
Analects, Confucian, 95
Analysis, abstract, 23
psycho-, 248

Ancient customs, observance of, 93
Androcles, 195
Angels, 7, 246
Angyal, Andras, 143
Animal, man as, 30, 48
man as the self -fabricating, 40
needs, 31
psychology, 108
understanding, 86
Animals, brainy, 36
warm-blooded, 27
Anthropology, 40, 192
Antisthenes, 101
Ants, example of the, 186
Anxiety, reasons for, 47
Aphrodite, visceral, 194
Apocalypse, 118

Appetites, over-indulgence of the, 145
Aquinas, Thomas, 20, 109, 156
Arbitrary compulsion, 150
Architecture, modern, 273

320'

INDEX

Ariel, 42

Aristotle, 61, 146, 156
Arjuiia, 86

Arnold, Matthew, 155

Arrested development, threats of, 36

AnivUme^ 106

^rt, ^importance of for human develop-
ment, 222

Artemis, muscular, 194
Aryan physics, 149
Asceticism, 83
Associations, ecological, 28
Astrology, 130
Astro-physicists, 24, 29
Athene, cerebral, 194
Atoms, 25

Augustine, 157, 233
Augustus to Trajan, 19
Auschwitz, 71
Autarchy, economic, 239
Authoritarian tradition, 154
Automatic processes, 224
Automatism, 3, 181, 232
Automaton, 222
/Autonomous activity, 187
Autonomous development, 281
Autonomy, 32
inner, 255
Axial change, 226

Babbage, Charles, 227
Bacchus, 197

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 208
Bacon, Francis, 186
Baha-^ullah, 117
Bahai, 117

Balance, 32, 180, 181, 182, 193, 214
achievement of, 183
acid-alkaline, 30
age of, 10

classic doctrine of, 183

dynamic, 243

idea of, 188

ideal of, 184

in time, principle of, 200

static, 190

Balance^ The Incarnation of, 205-215

Balance, The Reason for, 180-192
Balanced life, 282
Balanced man, 276, 288
Balanced person, 185, 291
Ballet Mecanique, 4
Barnard, Chester A-, 277
Barbarism, 222
danger of, 148
of civilization, 221
Basic English, 238
Baudelaire, Charles, 115
Beam, Kenneth S., 284
Beauty, 287

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 4
Behavior, all living, 29
Behavior Research Project, 158
Being, 64

transcendent nature of, 169
Bellamy, Edward, 236
Benedictine monastery, 184
Berchtesgaden, 263
Bergson, Henri, 40, 43, 86, 93, 94
Bergson’s duree, 261
Bernard, Claude, 30, 187
Bhagav.ad-Gita, 86
Big Brother, 111
Biography, assimilation of, 260
Biological weapons, 130
Birminghams, 198
Birth of the Person, The, 92-94
Bishop, Claire Huchet, 276
Bitch-goddess Success, 106
Black Death, 114, 201
Blake, William, 287
Blame-avoidance, 160, 171
Blameless people, 170
Blocks, evaluation, 129
Blood and soil, 8
Bloom, Leopold, 15
Blut und Boden, 125
Boccaccio, 201
Boimondau, 277
Boole, George, 176, 227
Boole, Mary Everest, 169, 176, 188
Borgese, G. A., 280
Bose, Jagadis, 78
Brahma, 56, 64

INDEX

.321

Brahmin’s rule, 210
Brahmo Samaj, 110
Brain, overgro-wth of, 36
Branford, Victor, 194
Bread labor, 282
Breakdown, moral, 13
Breughel, Peter, 114
Britain, high morale of, 168
British, the, at Dunkirk, 20
worker, mid-Victorian, 281
Broch, Hermann, 205
Brotherhood, mark of new, 271
Brothers Karamazov, The, 268
Browning, Robert, 77
Brutality, 152
Bucke, Richard, 5
Buchenwald, 71
Buddha, 106, 118
the Illumined One, 68
Buddhism. 25, 64» 84, 99, 103, 114, 118,
196, 201
Bunyan, 3

Burckhardt, Jacob, 115, 211, 231, 268, 270
Bureaucracy, safeguard against. 282
Burrow, Dr Trigant, 52
Business cycle, manic-depressive, 178
Butler, Samuel, 160

Caliban, 42

Callousness, present cult of, 153
Calvinism, 235
Cannon, Walter, 32, 34
Canvass of Possibilities, 5-11
Capacities, organic, 27
Capek, Karel, 125
Capitalism, 178, 236
lethal nature of, 178
private, 233
Caprice, random, 123
Captain Ahab, 16, 53
Carlyle, 40
Catastrophe, 3, 222
Catastrophe, Alternatives to, 18-21
Catastrophes, 264
Catholic Church, 103, 263
Causal mechanisms, operation of, 132
Causes, final, 131

Cerebrals, 194
Cervantes, 114
Chaldean faith, 130
Challenge of Evil, The, 156-160
Chamberlain, Neville, 155
Chamberlains, 171
Chance, 15, 133
Change, 177
an axial, 226
burden of, 189
inner, 236

large-scale social, 228
piecemeal, 224
social, manner of, 97
Society for the Prevention of, 104
Changes, cumulative, 133
Chaos, mechanical, 16
Charlatanism, 270
Chartres Cathedral, 8
Cheat the Prophet, game of, 134
Chesterton, Gilbert, 134
Child-observation, 284
Childbirth, 162

Children, maladjustment of, 258
wild, 42
China, 198, 220
Chinese, 182
wisdom, 211
Choices, man’s, 123
multifold, 128
Christ the Saviour, 68
Christian Church, 211
Christian Fathers, 154
Christian liturgy, 103
Christianity, 99, 101, 103, 118, 172, 196,
216, 232, 235

Christianity, as savior of civilization, 113
historic identity with Buddhism and
Islam, 114

liberating thought of, 110
myth of, 63
Orthodox, 116

Chronometricals and Horologiccds, 165-
170

Chuang-Chou, 45, 161
Church, medieval, 115
Universal, 117

INDEX

322.

ChurchiU, 'Winston, 155, 167, 231, 259
Civilization, Egyptian, 77
new development of, 216
invisible breakdown in, 148
repressed components of, 237
rigidity of modern, 271
saving of, 113
transformation of, 4, 232
Civilizations, rise of, 219
Classic civilization, gods of, 252
Classic religions, ofi5ce of the, 67
Cloister, the, 262
archaic forms of, 263
Closed society, pressures of, 99
Coghill, G. E., 35, 143
Coincidences, 28
Coitus, the first, 162
Collaboration, wiping out of interna-
tional, 150
Colonization, 237
Commedia delV arte, 219
Commitment, The Universal, 118-120
Commitments, biological, 128
fatal, 267

Communication, 150
instantaneous, 238
Commimion, 43, 153
with “God,” 88
“Communism,” 226
Communism, 179, 236
Stalinist, 144
Community, 243
of purpose, 190
re-polarization of, 97
universal, 94, 117

Compensation, psychological, 162 i
Complexity, historic, 26
Compulsion, 19
arbitrary, 150
totalitarian, 225
Comte, Auguste, 177, 178, 194
Concert of Europe, 279
Concord, 289

Condition of Man, The, 100, 190
Conditioned reflex, utopia of, 144
Conditioners, the, 16

Conduct, 155
ethical, 140
norms of, 165
predictable, 164
Confessional, Christian, 249
Confucianism, 103, 196
Confucius, 146, 182, 211
Congress of Religions, 210
Conrad, Joseph, 237
Conservatism, 179
Conservatives, 177

Constitution of a World Government, the
coming, 204

Contemplation, fortress of, 265
Continuities, 227
Continuity, 25, 29, 177
natural, 242

Control, quantitative, 189
Conversion, 99

Conversion, The Social Process of, 100-
107

Cooley, Charles Horton, 39, 277
Co-operation, 3, 30, 150
Copernicus, 7, 202
Corruptions, religious, 84
Cosmetic, 200
Cosmos, 27
nature of the, 65
Creation, confidence in, 290
mood of, 173
nature of, 135
Creativeness, 242
Creativity, 25, 242
arrest of, 11
impairment of, 141
language as source of, 44
Creators, 256
Creatureliness, human, 66
Criminal, opportunity for, 268
Cripples, inverted, 185
Crisis, 217
confrontation of, 290
present, 226

Cross-fertiliza^on, cultural, 10
Cruelty, participation in, 153
Cultural elements, repressed, 233

INDEX

323

Culture, 37, 38
creative period in, 217
dramatic interpretation of, 218
formative movements in, 216
fluctuations in, 217
growth of a mechanistic, 185
impulse to fabricate, 92
mechanized, 14
plot of, 218
static, 99
theme of, 218
Western, 191
Customs, 123
Cybele, 79

Cycle, downward, 20
of life, 199
of recurrence, 64
Cyprian, 9
Czarism, 177

Da-da, 149
Da-daism, 52

Daily Life, Discipline for, 281-284
Dairymen’s associations, 269
Dali, Salvador, 221
Damascus, 252

Dangerous thoughts, fear of, 19
Dante Alighieri, 61, 171
Darkness, and dream, 47
Darwin, 108, 131, 133, 146
Data, basic, 25

Daughters of the American Revolution,
210

da Vinci, Leonardo, 184
Day of rest, 258
Daydreams, 46
Days, length of, 291
“Dead Pan,” 153
Deaf-mutism, 43
Death, democratization of, 80
premature, 12
preparation for, 80
Death, Eternity and Sex, 76-82
Debasement, moral, 130
De-building principle, 80
Decapitation, modern man’s, 221
Decision, 269

Decline, cultural, 220
Decline of the West, 211
Dehumanization, 242
Deity, loving, 63
Delacroix, Eugene, 148
Delphi, 244

Democracy, ultimate lesson of, 120
Democratic party, 207
Democritus, 25
Demons, classic, 252
Demosthenes, 167

De-personalized, the, bias toward, 108
Design, emerging order of, 65
manifestations of, 137
Design, The Nature of, 134-139
Despiritualization, 90
Despotism, 225
Destroyer, 73

Detachment, 76, 100, 253, 257, 264
discipline of, 84
personal, 95
planned, 268

Detachment and Sacrifice, 82-86
Development, directional, 32
ethics of, 141, 147
human, 6
life’s, 125

Development, Preparation for, 244-251
Devil, 73, 163
Deviltry, Man’s, 54
Dewey, John, 67, 180, 245, 265
Diagnosis, of our times, the present, 223
Schweitzer’s, 211
Spengler’s, 211
Toynbee’s, 217

Diagnosis of Our Times, 11-18
Dialectical materialism, 224
Dictum, Maxwell’s, 232
Diderot, Denis, 163

Diet, Thoreau’s over-simplification of, 272
Differences, biological, 192
Differentia of man, biological, 135
Diogenes, 101, 119, 129
Dionysian, elements, industrialists’ con-
tempt for, 198
Dionysus, 79
Direction, self-, 179

324

IN0EX

Directions of Morality, 164
Discovery and Fabrication, Social, 36-39
Discrimination, 123, 139
qualitative, 145
quantitotive, 145, 146
Disembodiment, 100
Disintegration, 153, 220, 222, 223
^^cal, 144
psychic, 81
of bodily organs, 81
threat of, 3
Dispersion, the, 139
Disruption, favorable nature of, 8
Divine Comedy, The, 119
Divine, Emergence of the, 68-76
Divine, historic sense of the, 68
revelation, 69
Divinity, 242

Division of Labor, 37, 270
Doctrine of Singular Points^ 227
Doctrine of the Whole, 223-226
Doctrines, Christian, 25
Dogma, communist, 110
Dogmatic claims, irrational, 113
Domestic responsibilities, 283
Don Quixote, 194

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 60, 152, 262, 269
Drama, 218
cultural, 219
interior, 45
need for new, 222
Dramas, 223

Dream, the, 46, 53, 223, 248
faith in, 120
mechanism of, 54
origin of, 47

Dream, as psychodrama, 51

Dream consciousness, retarding, 50

Dream imagery, 45

Dream-work, 48

Dreams, 256, 265

Dreams, Interpretation of, 45-51

Dress, simplicity in, 234

Drives Toward War, 191

Drug, totalitarian, 21

Drugs, 144

Dunkirk, 20

Duree, 261

Dynamic equilibrium, 30, 180

Eastern Churches, 177
Economic life, impact of, 34
Economic Man, 191
Economy of abundance, 6, 161
Eddy, Mary Baker, 158
Educated Man, 186
Education, 199, 266
romantic, 234
Educators, 255
superficiality of, 256
Efflorescence, organic, 35
Ego, 248
tribal, 104
Egypt, 80, 220
Egyptian civilization, 77
Einstein, Albert, 202
Either-or, fallacy of, 179
Elementalism, misleading, 26
Elements, emergent, in new life, 223
transmutation of, 89
Eliot, T. S., 115
Ellis, Havelock, 190
Elohim, 74

Embodiment, 100, 103, 228
Emergence, 25, 29, 162, 169
into person, 241
Emergent Evolution, 73
Emergent, God as a new, 73
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 65, 138, 165, 222
272, 289

Emerson’s Uriel, 167
Emersonian individualism, 179
Emotional responses, drying up of, 146
Emotions, fear of, 153
Enactment, dramatic, 218
End, nature of, 132 *

Enemy, man as his own, 11
Energy, 9
command of, 9
Engels, Friedrich, 180, 203
England, 287
Englishwomen, 287
Entelechy, Aristotelian, 109
Entropy, 170

INDEX

325

Environment, 189
complexity of, 32
extra-organic, 39
Epicurus, 183
Epicurus’s injunction, 253
Epilogue, cultural, 220
Equalization, movement toward, 236
Equilibrium, 183
dynamic, 30, 180
inner, 257

no final state of, 188,
organic, 29, 31
Erasmus, 287
Eros, 76

Erotic adventure, extra-marital, 258
Eskimo, 93
Esperanto, 238

Essay on Universal Peace, 145
Essences, 53
Essenes, 101, 206

Established patterns, break with, 206
Esthetic delight, 126
Estimation, simple modes of, 122
Eternal Clockmaker, 133
Eternal Life, 77
Eternity, 59, 291
Eternity, Sex, and Death, 76-82
Ethan Brand, 16
Ethical center, shift of, 124
Ethical conduct, doctrine of, 130
Ethical development, basis for, 250
Ethical doctrine, Schweitzer’s, 213
Ethical philosophies, 175
Ethics, 123, 131

Etfdcs and Civilization, Schweitzer’s, 212
Ethics, experimental, 123
optimistic, 157
pessimistic, 157
roots of, 212

Ethics of human development, criteria
for, 139
Europe, 289
Eutopia, 236
Eutopianism, 226, 239
Eutopianism and Universalism, 235-240
Evaluation, 139, 265
Evaluation blocks, 129

Evaluations, man’s, 123
Events, importance of minute, 230
physical, 23
singular, 231
unique, 24

Everest, Mary (Boole), 176
Evil, 162

characterization of, 168
constancy of, 170
dynamic role of, 156
elimination of, 158
nature of, 170

rationalistic interpretation of, 244
threat of, 157

Evil, as a remediable disease, 160
Evils, subjective origins of, 158
Evolution, 34, 121
cosmic, 23

Existence, colorlessness of modern, 171
goals of, 69

and singular points, 227
Existentialist, the, 53
fashionable, 157
Experience, limitation of, 25
organic, 29

Explanation, causal, 241
teleological, 241
Exploration, 237
Expression, 222
need for strong, 187
Expressiveness, 242
Extermination, 148
mass, 12

Extermination camp, 152
Extermination chambers, Nazi’s, 231
External conditions, adaptation to, 122
External world, the, 229
Exuberance, emotional, 187

Fabrication and Discovery, Social^ 36-39

“Facts,” “hard, irreducible,” 214

Faith, Christian, 113

Faith for living, 292

Faith, re-building of, 224

Falstaff, 194

Family, cult of, 78

Family Log, The, 284

326

INBEX

Fantasies, 256
Fantasy, 248
Far-sightedness, 155
Faraday, Michael, 202
Fascism, 232, 282
Fate, 15
Germany’s, 112

*Fau|J:ian Man, obsolete ambitions of, 232
Fear, as basis of evil, 158
function of, 159

Federal Bureau of Investigation, 150
Fellowship, 43
Ferrovius, 195

Feverel, Sir Austin, system of, 175
Fichte, J. G., 95, 124
Final causes, 131
Finalism, illustrations of, 137
older doctrines of, 136
Finality, 133
Finiteness, human, 66
First World War, 150, 205
Five-Year Plan, 269
Fixation, 19
Fleurs du Mol, 116
Food, value of, 126
Food-chains, 32

Force, totalitarian need for, 111
Forces, emergent, 231
Forebrain, 144

Form, Man's Will to, 121-125
Formulation, 100, 228
Fourier, C. F. M., 278
France, mis^idance of, 172
Francis of Assisi, 76
Frank, Waldo, 15
Freedom, 181
human, 143

French West Africa, 209
Freud, Sigmund, 230, 247, 250
Friendliness, 26
Froebel, Friedrich, 278
Frustration, 285
Fulbright Act, 279
Fulfillment, ultimate, 138
Fullness of life, 168
Function, self-governing, 142

Functions, hierarchy of, 140
higher, 11, 104
highest, 140
human, 125
new Babel of, 185
partition of, 185
segregation of, 187
the servile, 142
Future, pull of, 108

Gair, Robert, 202
Galen, 51
Galileo, 114, 202

Gandhi, Mohandas K., 110, 210, 231,
235, 253, 256, 263
Garden of Eden, 63, 161
Garden Suburb, 234
Gargantua, 115
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 263
Gauss, K. F., 24

Geddes, Patrick, 31, 190, 194, 204, 210,
231

Genealogy of Morals, The, 109
General practitioner, dethronement of,
181

Generation, mysteries of, 79
Genocide, 12, 145, 165
biological instruments of, 222
Gentiles, 217

Gentleman, the ideal of, 184
George, Henry, 263
Germany, 151
Getting Married, 123
Gladiatorial spectacles, modern, 153
Glanvill, 134
Goal-seeking, 31, 137
Goals, 22
God, 68, 163, 291
classic concept of, 72
definition of, 88
a loving, 71
manifestations of, 74
presence of, 189
God as the creator, 73
God, as a new emergent, 73
God’s intentions, 138
Godhood, flashes of, 74

INDEX

327

Goebbels, 112
Goethe, J. W., 51, 185, 256
Golden Age, 161, 182
Golden Mean, 146
Goldsmith, Oliver, 233
Goldstein, Kurt, 53, 144
Good, 26
definition of, 156
purposive nature of, 138
Good and Evil, as dramatic struggle, 160
as polar opposites, 157
knowledge of, 122
Good life, conditions for, 142
Goodness, dangers of, 167
human, 22
natural, 170
nature of, 127
re-dedication to, 173
Goods, higher and lower, 142
human, 140

Goods of life, arrangement of, 142
Goody-goodness, 155
Gospel, the, 208
Gospel, Marxian, 117
Gospels, truth of all, 204
Government, resorption of, 282
Gradgrinds, 198
Graham, Michael, 283
Grand tour, a democratic version, 279
Gratry, Augustin, 257
Gray, Thomas, 233
Great Good Place, The, 262-265
Greco- Judaic world, 101
Greeks, 182
fifth century, 182
Greenwich time, moral, 166
Gregory the Great, 110, 265
Group, 274
face-to-face, 283
pressures of the, 124
return to the, 274
self-governing, 275
Group, Re-Union with the, 274-280
Growth, 169

condition for human, 184
observation of children’s, 284
parental, 284

Growth (Cont.)
purposeless, 138
way of, 283

Guidance, case for ethical, 163
Guilt, 69
burden of, 159
sense of, 159, 170
Gulliver, 235
Gurdjiev, 213
Gymnastic, 200

H-bombs, 222
Habits, 93, 123
infantile, 154
place of, 123

Hague Conference, The, 239
Hahnemann, S. C. F., 176, 273
Happiness, 141
Hardness, promotion of, 153
as old-fashioned, 231
Harmony, intellectual need for, 180
Hate, 285

•Hathaway, Katharine Butler, 200
Hawaiian, the, 289
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 16, 165
Health, 243
and goodness, 156
Heart of Darkness, The, 237
Hedonism, 175
Hell, 62
idea of, 221

Hellenism, Olympian, 196

Henderson, Lawrence J., 131

Henry, Joseph, 202

Heraclitus, 44, 93

Herder, J. G., 212, 233

Heritage, social, 37

Herzen, Alexander, 177, 262

“Hide Yourself,” 253

Hierarchic Functions, meaning of, 143

Hierarchy, normal, 226

Hierarchy, The Organic, 140-144

Higher functions, dethronement of, 144

Higher processes, interpretation of, 136

Hindu, 113

Hindu civilization, static nature of, 212

INDEX

32S

Hindu philosophy, Schweitzer’s critique
of, 212

Hinduism, 64, 78, 235
catholicity of, 109

Historic institutions, saving weakness of,
177

History, assimilation of, 260
human, 25
man’s life in, 27
philosophers of, 217
singular moments in, 231
History and purpose, 134
Hitler, Adolf, 19, 110-112, 149, 221, 262,
269

Hollywood, 271

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 185

Holy Trinity, Western culture’s, 201

Homans, George C., 277

Homo Faber, 40, 50

Homo Sapiens, 40

Horologicals and Chronometricals, 165-
170

Household economy, 272
Housman, A. E., 13
Howard, Ebenezer, 277
Howard, John, 212
Human body, as approach to self, 247
mutations of, 221

Human behavior, physiological analysis
of, 144

self-determination of, 241
Human culture, dramatic interpretation
of, 220

Human development, organic view of, 39
unfathomed possibilities of, 121
Human economy, William Morris’s in-
sight into, 161

Human experience, meaningfulness of,
76

original ingredients of, 26
Human goods, life as source of, 125
Human growth, 289
Human Nature and Society, 127
Human needs, elaboration of, 125, 126
Human personality, effect of, 228
Human scale, 276
Human values, lack of, 211

Humanism, 108
Humanity, renewal of, 292
Humber, R. L., 206, 207
Humber Resolution, 206
Hume, David, 129
Humility, 251
Hundred best books, 281
Hydrogen bomb, 172

I-and-Thou relation, 252
Iconoclasts, self-confident, 123
Id, 104, 221, 222, 248
Ideal, function of, 166
Ideal projects, 223
Ideal purpose, 207

Ideal Type, The Whole Man As, 196-205
Ideal types, 197
Idealism, Hegelian, 225
Pierre’s unconditional, 167
Ideals, romantic, 234
tribal, 18

Ideas, de-polarization of, 216
framework of, 22
life-renouncing, 101
mutation of, 240

Ideologies, re-polarization of, 240
Ideology, utilitarian, 28
Ikhnaton, 74, 94
Illiterates, moral, 154
Illness, as source of development, 162
Illumination, 64, 100
intellectual, 169
Illusion, 49
Imbeciles, moral, 154
Impetus, vital, 30
Impulse, in relation to value, 129
Incarnation, 99, 100, 228
Incorporation, 100, 103, 228
India, 198

Indifference, moral, 153
Individualism, 179

Industrial order, limited nature of pres-
ent, 181
Inertia, 64
sins of, 171
Inferno, 61, 171
Infinity, 59

INDEX

329

Inheritance, biological, 92
Initiative, group, 275
Injuries, 230

Ink-blot, interpretation, 249
Rorschach, 56

Inner Eye and Voice^ The, 252-257

Inner selves, 255

Inner World,. 41

Innerness, 264

Innocence, world of, 161

Innovators, 188, 256

Inquisition, 20

Insensitiveness, ideological, 152
Institutions, historic, 177
Insurgence, 30
Integration, 207, 285, 292
Integration and Love, 284-288
Intellectual Man, 191
Intelligence, 123
Intercourse, planetary, 280
International Congresses, 238
Interpretation, cultural, 38
dramatic, 218-223
Freudian, 50
function of, 25
mechanistic, 35
structure of, 54
system of, 24

Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 162

Invention, 238

Inventions, origin of, 24

Iron lung, 141

Irrational, 291

Irrationality, human, 48

Irritability, 30

Iseult and Tristan, 288

Ishtar, 79

Isis, 79

Islam, 77, 100, 114, 203
Isolation, 239
weakness of, 24
Isolationism, 152
the Kremlin’s, 232
paranoid, 226
Israel, 101, 139
Ivan the Terrible, 110

James, Henry, 262, 263

James, Henry, Sr., 286

James, William, 72, 88, 193, 229, 278

Janet, Paul, 131

Japan, 151

Japanese, extermination of, 12
Jean-Christophe, 209
Jefferson, Thomas, 185
Jennings, H. S., 122
Jespersen, Otto, 41

Jesus, 74, 101, 102, 106, 109, 113, 118,
167, 189, 196, 211, 238
imitators of, 209
life of, 208

Jewish history, purpose in, 139

Jews, 12., 139

Job, 72, 81

John the Baptist, 119

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s, 227

Jung, C. G., 90

Kali, 73, 87
Kallen, Horace, 88
Kant, Immanuel, 114, 127, 145
Karamazov, 60
Keller, Helen, 168
Kepler, 114
Kindergarten, 234, 278
Kindness. 285
Kingdom of God, 71, 72
Kingdom of Heaven, 91
Kinsey, Alfred C., 129
Kiss, 287

“Know thyself,” 244
Know yourself, 251
Knowledge, 66
Koln, 136
Koran, The, 204
Korzybski, Alfred, 9, 250
Krishma, 86
the Archer, 68
Kroeber, A. L., 50, 90, 250
Kropotkin, Peter, 190, 231, 262

Labor, specialization of, 37
Labor-saving device, language of, 41
Language, 44
basic nature of, 44

3S0

INDEX

Language (Cont.)
constant function of, 51
development of, 41
hum^n role of, 43
loss of, 42
origins of, 47
^structure of, 42
universal, 239, 240
Language, Miracle of, 39-45
Language, as vehicle of social solidarity,
51

Languages, primitive, 44
Lao-tse, 24

Large-scale organization, 270
Law, 149
Laws, The, 142
Leader, The, -worship of, 226
magical attributes of, 98
Leaders, inadequacy of, 120
as victims, 15
Leadership, burden of, 120
totalitarian, 112
League of Nations, 210
Leibnitz, G. W., 38, 114
Le Play, Frederic, 277
Lenin, Nikolai, 110, 149, 262
Leonardo da Vinci, 184
Lethargy, challenge to, 119
Letters from the Underworld, 269
Life, 291

anti-systematic nature of, 176

attributes of, 177

characteristics of, 27, 29

deficiency of, 254

defect of, 181

definition of, 36

exuberance of, 28, 34

the good of, 130

insecurity of, 33

irrationalities of, 72

irretrievability of, 267

man’s capacity to re-present, 55

nature of, 31

nurture of, 286

plan of, 30

positive vision of, 255

preparation for, 266

Life (Cont.)

radical imperfection of, 184
rarity of, 23
renewal of, 187, 215
reverence for, 139
sacredness of, 79
tempo of, 257
trajectory of, 156, 199
transformation of, 122
Life, as a dynamic system, 12
as musical score, 266
as purposive, 137
as selective process, 31, 128
Life, Background of, 27-33
Life, The Renewed of, 288-292
Life, The Salt of, 160-165
Life-experience, 205
Life-negation, Christian, 202
Life-plan, 28, 29
Life-sense, lack of, 172
Life insurance corporations, 269
Limits, throwing off of, 147
Lippmann, Walter, 136
Lisbon, 71

Little Locksmith, The, 200
Living, Time for, 257-262
Living God, The, 213
Locke, 128
Logic, 257
Logic, 44

Logical positivism, 52

Loki, 73

Lollards, 235

Looking Backward, 236

Love, 283, 285, 286

Love and Integration, 284-288

Lower functions, dominance of, 141

Loyola, Ignatius, 142, 246, 250

Luther, Martin, 75

Machine, age of the, 4
challenge to the, 233
domination of the, 223
ideology of, 180
Machine-herd, 15
Machines, 243
MacCoU, D. S., 196, 197

INDEX

33i

Magic Mountain, The, 141
Maitreyan Age, 10
Maladjustment, need for, 188
Malinowski, B., 250
Mammals, 27
Mammon, 233
Man, annihilation of, 125
appearance of, 96
Buddhist, 199 '
deepest needs of, 61
Dionysian, 196-197
his remaking of himself, 121
historic dimensions of, 56
making of, 37
maladjustment of, 54
natural history of, 122
nature of, 4
origin of, 62
potentialities of, 37
Promethean, 203
psychologically-adjusted, 191
transformation of, 93, 98
Man, as end of nature, 135
as god, 67
as interpreter, 56
as his own enemy, 11
as product of nature, 92
Man as Interpreter, 51-57
Man, The Mythologies of, 62-67
Man, Nature of, 25-27
Man’s nature, Christian view of, 63
Man’s organic functions, 92
Man’s world, multi-dimensionality of, 241
Man-sheep, 95
Manchesters, 198
Mani, 101
Manichees, 70, 78
Mankind, united, 274
Mann, Thomas, 141
Manners, directness in, 234
Mannheim, Karl, 190
Manual labor, duty of, 235
Manual worker, 28l
Marital harmony, 286
MarshaU Plan, 232
Martyrs, 124

Marx, Karl, 39, 190, 203, 262
his materialism, 224
Marxian communism, 179
Marxian communist, 113
Marxian theology, 226
Marxism, 225
Marxist, 152
Mask, the divine, 65
personal, 102
the Universal, 94-100
Mass man, 16

Massachusetts, crime in, 163
Materialism, 63
ancient scientific, 59
dialectical, 224
Marxian, 225
present-day, 62
purposeless, 237, 273
Roman, 110

Matter, definition of, 24
Matthew, 101
Maturation, 184
Maxwell, James Clerk, 226
Maxwell’s doctrine, confirmation of, 228
Mazzini, Joseph, 262
Mead, Margaret, 250
Mean, doctrine of the, 146
Meaning, nature of, 53
Meanings, subjective, 55
Meat packers organizations, 269
Mechanical aids, and simplicity, 272
Mechanical order, 241
over-valuation of, 122
Mechanical progress, 7
Mechanism, 32, 201
bias of, 35
and purpose, 132

semantic misinterpretation of, 133
Mechanization, 273
Medicine, Hippocratic, 246
Medieval church, 115
Melville, Herman, 16, 165, 181, 185, 263
Memory, breakdown of, 52
Mencius, 211
Meredith, George, 175
Messiah, 101
false, 111

INDEX

Messiahs, past, 119
Metamorphosis, magic of, 27
Methodology, post-Galilean, 202
Michejangelo, 184
Microcosm, man as, 78
Middle way, pragmatic, 193
Migrations, planetary, 278
Militarism, 201
Military corporations, 268
Mill, John Stuart, 179
Mind, religious, 61
Ministers of grace, 246
Minority, the despised, 217
Miracle of personality, 97
Missionary, 208
medical, 209, 210
Missionary enterprise, 192, 237
Mithra, 79
Mithridates, 157
Mobility, 289
Moby Dick, 53, 86
Moby-Dick, 181
Moderation, dangers of, 146
Modern Man, myths of, 17
Modern man, as incapable of doing
wrong, 151

Modern society, healthy organs of, 151
Modern times, hell of, 172
Modern woman, clothes of, 272
Modernism, ethical, 164
Mohammedan, prayers of, 259
Mohammedism, 118
Moliere, 24
Moloch, 82, 233
Moments, 169
illumined, 170
unpredictable, 227
Monasteries, Benedictine, 83
Monastic withdrawal, 262
Money, 201

Moral Equivalent for War, 278
Moral error, Pierre’s, 167
Moral greatness, Schweitzer’s, 214
Moral ideal, 166
l^oral judgment, 149
Moral Hfe, 168

Moral principles, absoluteness of, 163

Moral relativity, as false absolute, 164

Moral Renewal, Conditions for, 152-156

Moral values, renewal of, 155

Morality, main directions of, 164

Morals, 123

More, Thomas, 235

Moreno, J. L., 249, 250

Morgan, Lloyd, 162

Morris, Charles, 196, 197

Morris, William, 161, 190, 273

Mosaic Judaism, 103

Moses, 74

Moslem warrior, 203
Moslems, 78, 126
Mother, as language bearer, 42
Mo-Ti, 211

Mountain climber, man as, 11
Mowrer, 77
Murray, Gilbert, 216
Murray-Morgan Thematic Apperception
Tests, 249, 250

Mutants, dynamic force of, 116
Mutation, The New, 240-243
Mutual Aid, 8, 32, 78
Mysteries, 60
Mystery, cosmic, 66
Mystic, the, 72
Myth, Christian, 8

Nakedness, as symbol, 182
Nansen, 210
Napoleon 1, 106

Napoleon of Notting Hill, The, 134
Nationalism, 124
devaluation of, 209
Natural existence, limitations of, 74
Natural responses, blunting of, 152
Natural Selection, 133
Naturalism, 221
Nature, 229
conquest of, 5
ends of, 131
higher, 104
human, 60
man’s original, 92
morality of, 32
operation of, 132

INDEX

Nature (Cont.)
plan of, 34

as product of culture, 26
second, 93
socially acquired, 92
-world of, 23
Nature of Man, 25-27
Nature of Personality^ 264
Nausea, as spiritual symptom, 221
Nazi, 152

Nazi anthropology, 149
Nazi Germany, 18, 239
Nazism, 144
Necessity, 181
Needs, human, 125
Needs and Values, 125-130
Negation, processes of, 222
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 263
Neibuhr, Reinhold, 162, 166, 212
Neighbor, 274
Nerve, loss of, 216
Neti, neti, 88
Neutrality, 231
New Atlantis, The, 186
New Deal, 239
and autarchy, 239
New human type, 215
New Machiavelli, The, 150
New Man, nature of, 215
New Orientation, 242
New person, message of the, 105
New personality, claims of the, 103
New Philosophy, 226
New religion, original intuitions of, 103
New Self, emergence of, 97
New species, appearance of, 98
New Stone Age, 93
New Testament, 86, 95, 106, 1%

New world, foundation stones of, 210
New World Symphony, 4
News from Nowhere, 161
Newton, Isaac, 202

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 109, 140, 152, 185,
190

Nihilism, 13, 269
cult of, 150

Nineteen Eighty-four, 125

333

Nonconformity, necessity of, 124
Non-Being, 64
Non-conformists, 256
Non-repeatable events, 230
North Carolina, 206
Northrop, F. S. C., 191
Nose, as sense organ, 135
Novelty, 177
Nuclear physics, 65

Objectivity, one-sided, 231
Obliteration bombing, 145
Odysseus, 198
Oedipus, 81
Oedipus complex, 249
Old age, effect of, 201
Old Stone Age, 93
Old Testament, 196
Olympian, 196
Olympus, 64
Omissions, 263
On Being Sixty, 199
One World, 4
Oneida Community, 178
O’Neill, James J., 206
Open synthesis, philosophy of, 180
Open systems, 183
Operationalism, 59
Opposition, dialectic, 30
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 175
Order, 177
natural, 242
Organic balance, 182
Organic functions, 136
man’s, 92

Organic hierarchy, 140
Organic life, 27
characteristics of, 29
Organic need, 126

Organic unity, Hegelian conception of,
224

Organism, 189, 243
selections of, 128
total engagement of the, 126
Organisms, non-specialized, 186
Organizer, in growth, 242
Organs of speech, 41

334

INDEX

Orgasms, 222

Orientation, new, 242

Origin, subjective, 158

Orthodoxy, crystallized, 112

Orwell, George, 125

Osiris, 68, 79

^sler, Dr William, 273

Over-protection, psychological, 237

Owen, Robert, 157, 245

Pacifist, absolute, 145

Paine, Thomas, 212

Palestine, Jewish return to, 139

Paley, Archdeacon, 133

Palingenesis, 116

Panza, Sancho, 194

Parenthood, first lessons of, 152

Paris Exposition, 238

Parmenides, 44

Party of order, 177

Party of progress, 177

Pascal, Blaise, 65, 202

Pass-word, language as, 43

Passiveness, Wordsworth’s wise, 259

Past, drag of, 108

Pathology, The Optimism of, 216-223
Paths of Life, The, 196
Pattern, 241
underlying, 65
Pattern of life, 175
change in, 20

Pattern, overall, of culture, 220
Paul of Tarsus, 101, 183, 245
Pauline Epistles, 106
Pause, creative, 258
Peace, price of, 274
Peguy, Charles, 253
Peirce, Charles, 286
‘‘Perennial Philosophy,” 72
Perfect yourself, 251
Perfection, danger of, 161
Perfectionism, egoistic, totalitarian per-
version of, 236
Person, 24
appearance of, 95
awakened, 291
birth of the, 94

Person (Cont.)
components of, 242
concept of the, 241
development of the, 22
displacement of the, 230
growth of the, 124
illumined, 99

pre-rational characteristics of, 248
primacy of the, 243
recovery of initiative for, 273
role of, 230

Person, as an emergent, 190
Person, as emergent from group, 124
Person, Birth of the, 92-94
Personal, Bias Against the, 107-112
Personal transformation, resistance to,
108

Personality, 243, autonomous activities
of, 14

balanced, 276
category of, 229

as an emergent from community, 201
exclusion of, 242
the human, 33
ideal dimensions of, 203
its operation in history, 232
major operations of, 228
miracle of, 97
new, 102, 288
projection of, 229
realm of, 33
three phases of, 197
transmutation of, 119
universal aspects of, 204
Personality and property, 143
Personality types, 193
Personality-images, 191
Personalities, awakened, 291
Persons, constitution of, 200
Persons, as things, 224
Peruvians, 182
Petrarch, 114
Petrie, Flinders, 210
Pharisee, 167
Pharaoh, as person, 80
Philanderers, The, 123
Philosophers, Greek, 22, 170

INDEX

335

Philosophy, new, 8

Philosophy, Schweitzer’s criticism of, 213
Philosophy of the whole, 180
Physical magnitudes, importance of
small, 228
Physical need, 126

Physical world, scientific description of,
58

Physicist, as Ethan Brand, 17
Physics, nuclear, 90
Physiology, 192

Picnic, romantic popularization of, 234

Pierre, 165, 254

Pilgrim, 196, 199

Plan, rigidity of, 136

Plan of life, 255

Planet, conquest of the, 238

Planning, diurnal, 264

Plans, 223

Plato, 22, 44, 59, 63, 142, 146, 183, 244,
287

Plato’s Republic, 149
Play, 284

Playfulness, 35, 234
Plotinus Plinlimmon, 165
Po Chii-i, 199
Poet, unreality of, 96
Poincare, Henri, 49
Polar opposites, 157
Polarizing element, 241
Poles, as Nazi victims, 153
Polybius, 9
Polynesia, 233
Pontius Pilate, 232
Poor Richard, 257
Possibilities, Canvass of, 5-11
Postulates of Synthesis, 22-25
Potidaea, 154

Power, as Promethean aim, 203
sign of, 13

substitution for goodness, 144
Powers, human, 7
Poverty, world, 236
Pragmatists, 188
error of, 124

Prayer, Jesus’s injunctions about, 103
Predictability, 230

Premise, unexamined, 159
Present, determination of, by future, 133
Pressure of time, external, 261
Pride, 69, 245
Primitive, behavior of, 42
Primitivism, mythical, 233
Prince Hal, 194
Prison, as cloister, 263
Probability, 28
Problems, insoluble, 87
Problems of Christianity, The, 116
Process, unifying, 23
Processes, mental and moral, 35
upbuilding, 151
Production, quantitative, 146
Productiveness, decrease in, 192
Productivity, Western, 114
Professionalism, Athenian attitude
toward, 142
Progress, 121
inertia of, 21
mechanical, 7
Proletariat, 217
Prologue, the unspoken, 25
Prometheans, 202, 203
Prometheus, 64, 198
Promises, 6

Property, importance of, 143
Prophet, appearance of, 97
direct effect of, 102
Prospero, 42
Protestantism, 233
Psyche, 49, 76
Psychiatrists and evil, 158
Psychic material, 49
Psychoanalysis, 248
Psychodiagnostics, 249
limits of, 250
Psychodrama, 51
Psychokinesis, 51
Psychological overcrowding, 16
Psychologist, Loyola as, 246
Psychologists, 223
Psychology, 40
analytical, 249

Psychopathic tendencies, extent of, 154
Public education, free, 178

836

INDEX

Public work, 278
Purpose, 28, 241
aristocratic, 140
cospic, 131
evidence of, 131
modifications of, 137
transformation of, by medium, 135
Purpose, The Case for, 130-134
Purposeful goals, 241
Purposeless growth, 138
Purposelessness, 221
Purposes, change in, 22
theory of, 131
Pyramids, 119
Pythagoras, 59

Quakers, 235, 273
Qualitative discrimination, 145, 147
Quantitative control, 147
Quantitative discrimination, 145
Quantitative productivity, 192
Quantitative restrictions, 189
Quantity f The Control of, 144-147
Questions, Use of Unanswerable, 58-62

Rabelais, Frangois, 114, 115
Radical imperfection of life, 184
Radicalism, 179
Radicals, 177
Ramakrishna, 204
Rasmussen, K. J. V., 93
Rational development, 50
Rationalism, over-confidence in, 246
Rationalists, eighteenth century, 89
Reading blocks, 129
Re-affirmation and Repentance, 170-174
Realize yourself, 251
Reason and custom, 245
Rebirth, 103, 116
pain of, 174
Reckoning, day of, 267
Rediscovery of America, The, 15
Reflection, 265
Reflexes, animal, 11
Regime, Soviet Russian, 177
Regression, political, 239
Regularity, 230

Rejection, 252
of life, 221

Relativism, dangers of, 165
Relativity, ethical, 163
Religion, 58, 89
Bahai, 117
and civilization, 212
classic missions of, 81
degradation of, 75
offices of, 218
Olympian, 114
purposes of, 59
realm of, 57

Religion, as “sphere of the possible,” 67
Religion, as sphere of sacred, 87
Religion, Next Development of, 112-118
Religion, Positive Functions of, 86-91
Religions, classic, 92, 203
Religions, historic, 235
mission of the, 234
Religions, and phases of life, 200
re-orientation of, 205
Religious attitudes, fundamental, 196
Religious consciousness, 59
Religious transformation, 98
Renan, Ernest, 109
Renascence, 184
Renewal, 4, 66, 207, 232
of life, 187, 215
process of, 33
road of, 21
Renoir, Auguste, 199
Renunciations, heroic, 105
Reorientation, 4
inner, 94

Repentance, 173, 184, 251
Repentance and Re-affirmation, 170-174
Repetition, defiance of, 234
escape from cycle of, 162
Repetitions, cultural, 220
Repetitive pattern, 93
Repetitive processes, 241
Reproduction, 66
Republic, The, 121, 183
Republican party, 207
Responses, erotic, 27

INDEX

33?

Responsibility, assumption of, 290
avoidance of moral, 171
Responsiveness, organic, 30
Restraint, inner, 143

Revolution, materialistic conceptions of,
226

Rewards, human, 96

Rhine, Hr. J. B., 51

Rhythmic alteration, need for, 189

Riesman, David, 256

Right and wrong, 122

Roberts, Morley, 34

Rockets, 6

Roles, assumption of, 98
Roman Catholic Church, stabilization of
19

Roman imperialism, resurgence of, 110
Roman imperium, 219
Romanticism, 226, 233
contributions of, 234
weakness of, 179
Rorschach, 56, 249, 250
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 212, 233, 272
Routine, disruption of, 234
need for breaks in, 258
Routines, compulsive, 258
Rowntree, Seebohm, 281
Royce, Josiah, 116
Ruskin, John, 190, 273
Ruskin’s works, 281
Russell, Bertrand, 63
Russia, 151, 177
Russian communism, 203
Russian Czarism, 19

Sabbath, 258
Sacred, sphere of the, 87
Sacrifice, 83, 214
acceptance of, 156
function of, 85
typical act of, 209
Sacrifice and Detachment, 82>B6
Sacro Egoismo, 125
Safety, factor of, 34
St. John, 286
Saints, 124

Salvation, by simplification, 271
one dimensional, 222
Sancho Panza, 194
Sanity, 243

Sanskrit, translation of, 10
Satan, 73

Saul of Tarsus, 252
Saviour Emperor, 112
School, mark of new, 263
Schopenhauer, 84
Schweitzer, Albert, 207, 208, 253
as musicologist, 209
as medical missionary, 209
as theologian, 208
meaning of his life, 214
Science, causal interpretation of, 87
newer insights of, 24
post-Newtonian, 225
principles of, 229
Sciences, limitations of, 58
the physical, 242
Scientists, pure, 205
Scott, Walter, 233
Second birth, 96
Second-living, 268

Second World War, 130, 156, 232, 259,

Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The. 46
Security, 181, 236
Segregation, 239
Seidenberg, Roderick, 231
Selection, 139
Selectivity, 143
Self, biological, 54
Loyola’s, 246
mirrors of the, 249
new kind of, 93
rationalist analysis of the, 246
re-building of the, 274
a super-organic, 39
tribal, 8, 95
Self-abdication, 264
Self-direction, 94, 143
Self-discipline, 189
Self-examination, 253, 268
Self-fabrication, 5, 39
Self-government, 143

INDEX

§38

Self-inquisition, 251
Self-knowledge, 244, 245
achievement of, 250
as i>asis ior education, 250
way to, 245
Self-love, 8, 244
§!elf-respect, primitive, 15
Self-righteousness, 251
Self-transformation, 102
Selves, natural, 221
Sen, Keshab Chandra, 117
Sensation, nature of, 40
Sense data, 26
Sensibility, 123
Sensitiveness, need for, 152
Sequences, organic, 28
Sermon on the Mount, 238
Service, universal, 274
Sex, 283-4

SeXf Eternity, and Death, 76-82
Sexual intercourse, 258
Sexual relations, communism in, 178
Sexuality, religious, 79
Shaftesbury, 164
Shakespeare, 114, 186, 246
Shaw, George Bernard, 123, 195
Sheldon, W. H., 15, 193, 196, 197, 249
Signals, 41

Significance, loss of, 14
Signs, 41
Silence, 264
Simplicity, 272
benign, 270
conceptual, 26

Simplification, effective kinds of, 272
modes of, 271
for salvation, 271

Simplifiers, The Terrible, 268, 270
Sin, 184

avoidance of word, 170
involvement in, 172
nature of, 172
Singular moments, 231, 241
Singular Points, 226-232
Sins of inertia, 171
Sisterhood, mark of new, 271
Sixth Century b.c., 10

Sleep, 46

Sleepwalkers, The, 205
Slow-down, 258
Social breakdown, 149
Social change, by irradiation, 228'
scientific description of, 228
Social compulsion, 179
Social phenomena, natqre of, 12
Social transformation, 105
difficulty of, 119
Socialism, 22, 226, 236
possible weaknesses of, 237
Socialists, 223
Society, defiance of, 148
renewal of, 22, 274
renovation of, 235
Society of Friends, 235
Sociologists, 223
Socrates, 80, 154, 244, 245
Soderblom, Archbishop, 213
Soldiers, transformation into, 98
Solidarity, 179
Solitude, 257
Song of Myself, 248
Sophocles, 182

SoTcerePs Apprentice, The, 147
Sorel, Julien, 106
Sorokin, P., 217, 250
Soul, rational, 25
South Africa, 239
Soviet communism, 19
Soviet rulers, identity with D*A.R., 210
Soviet Russia, 19, 172, 225, 239
Space, exploration of, 7
Specialism, 10
defects of, 186

Specialisms, encyclopedic massings of,
191

Specialists, 181
Specialization, 185
over-, 37
Speech, 40, 53
invention of, 45
playfulness of, 42
Speed, god of, 82
Speed-up, 259

Snencer. Herbert* 36* 82. TOO

INDEX

Spengler, Oswald, 149, 211, 217
Spinoza, Benedict de, 114, 131
Spirit, defilement of, 221
Spiritual Exercises, 247
Spiritual Man, 191
Spontaneity, 234
Stabilities, 227
Stability, 177 ,

Stabilization, 19

Stalin, Joseph, 19, 110, 111, 112, 262
deification of, 225
totalitarianism of, 225
Stalinist science, 149
Standardization, 237
Standards, lowering of, 272
Standards of civilization, universal, 164
Stanford University, 264
Star-gazers, Chaldean, 55
Steiner, Rudolph, 213
Stimson, Henry L., 171
Stimuli, need for interpreting, 40
Stoic boast, 189
Stoicism, 63
Struggle, cultural, 220
“Struggle for existence,” 46
Darwin’s, 203
Student migrations, 278
Study of History, A, 100
Subjective reactions, 43
Suicide, taboo against, 84
Summa Theologia, 20
Sun-power, 9
Sung Dynasty, 220
Super-ego, 248
acceptance of, 152
Super-normal powers, 98
Superfluous, Economy of the, 34-36
Superman, 152
Survey of York, 281
Survival, man’s biological, 66
values for, 20

Survival and life-needs, 141
Survivals, 116
Symbiosis, 32

Symbol-making activities, 53
Symbolic expression, 126

3^9 ‘

Symbolic functions, 51
loss of, 52

Symbolic interpretation, 39
Symbolic reference, 53
Symbolism, 45
Symbolization, 44
tools of, 40
Symbols, 53, 55
Symposium, The, 154
Syncretism, An Organic, 232-235
Synthesis, 25, 223, 226
Synthesis, Postulates of, 22-25
System, teleological, 137
of interpretation, 24
System-makers, 176
System-mongers, 178
Systems, as conceptual tool, 178
ethical, 175
exclusive, 177
skepticism of, 180
Systems, The Fallacy of, 175-180

Taoism, 234

Taboos, life-preservative, 148
Teething, 162
Teleology, nature of, 137
Temperaments, the four, 193
Temperaments and Types, 192-196
Temperance, physical, 188
Tempo, 257, 262

slowing down of, 261
Tenderness, need for, 152
Teniers, 273
Tension, use of, 190
Terrible SimpBfiers, The, 268, 270
Terrorism, 150
Tertullian, 83

Thematic Apperception Tests, 249
Theognis, 146

Theologian, Schweitzer as, 208
Theological liberalism, 81
Theology, Christian, 172
Marxian, 226
naive conceits of, 61
Theosophist, 113
Therapeutae, 101, 206
Therapy, psychoanalytic, 268

INDEX

hermo-dyiiamics, second law of, 73
'hings, as persons, 224
'hinking, contrapuntal, 260, 261
polyp J^onic, 260
specialized, 260
'homas Aquinas, 20, 156
'horeau, Henry David, 76, 110, 185, 253,
254, 270, 272, 289
'horndyke, Edward L., 127
^'hought, disciplined, 49
^'hrasymachus, 149
?hurber, James, 45
Time, balance in, 187
religious cycle of, 78
subjective, 261

rime of Troubles, 97, 101, 105, 130, 173
Schweitzer’s diagnosis of, 211
Time-obsession, 258
Time-saving, 136, 260
Timeless, orientation to the, 78
rimes, Diagnosis of Our, 11-18
Tintoretto, 114, 273
Titan, 196, 199
Tobacco land, 271
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 236
Tokyo, 12

Tolman, Edward C,, 191
Tolstoy, Leo, 110, 201, 254, 264, 282
Tolstoyan principles, 235
Tongues, gift of, 42
Torture, 150
engines of, 115
pseudo-scientific, 231
Totalitarians, 188
error of, 124

Toynbee, Arnold J., 94, 97, 100, 113, 114,
217, 250, 263
Trace elements, 230

Traditional religions, vital impulses of,
113

Transcendence, 5, 76, 169
Transformation, human, 97
organic, 29
personal, 104
religious, 98
Transition period, 288
Transitional era, problems of, 261

Traumas, 230
Trial and error, 184
Tribal norms, 104
Tribal society, passage from, 123
Tribalism, 124
Tristan, 76, 288
Truth, canons of, 24
Two Lives, The Need /or,^ 265-268
Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 93
Types, the activist, 202
domination of cerebral in India and
China, 198
ideal, 197

temperamental, 193
theory of, 195

Types and Temperaments, 192-196
Tyranny, Czarist, 104

Ubangi, 182
Ulm, 136

Ultimate goals, life’s, 134
Ultimate questions, 61
Ulysses, 15

Unanswerable questions, rejection of, 59
Unconscious, the, 49, 248
primitive elements in, 14
Understanding as creation, 68
UNESCO, 150
Unfriendliness, 26
Uniformity, 237
United Nations, 172, 206
United Nations Flag, 207
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration, 206
United States, frontier tradition, 281
Unity, 113, 226
need for, 223

planetary, before 1914, 150
worldwide, 240

Universal Church, Caesarean organiza-
tion of, 235

Universal community, 117
Universal language, 238
Universal man, appearance of, 107
Universal principles, 164
Universal religions, failure of, 195

INDEX

34.

Universalism, 237
abortive, 240
political, 239
technical, 238, 239

Universalism and Eutopianism, 235-240
Universality, 193
Universe, depersonalized, 55
man as the 'Center ci, 91
transformatio*ir7rf, 69
University, mark of new, 263
Unknowable, the, 60
Unpredictable, the, 291
UNRRA, 8, 206, 232
Useless instrument, man’s possession of,
41

USSR, 225
Utopia (1516), 235

Value, gauge of, 82
judgments of, 122
Values, definition of, 127
established, 127
as life-furthering, 128
place of, 122

Schweitzer’s transvaluation of, 213
traditional, 123
Values and Needs, 125-130
Van Gogh, Vincent, 209, 253
Variation, 177
Variations, internal, 30
Variety, 242

Verbalization, misuse of, 52
Vesalius, 114
Vico, G. B., 68, 221, 233
.YTCtorian couples, fecund, 124
Victory by extermination, 148
Vigilance, 154
Villon, FranQois, 115
Violence, sins of, 171
Virgin Mary, 79, 103
Virtue, desert island, 155
dramatic, 99
Virtues, theological, 82
Vital lies, 65
Vitality, 9

animal, lessening of, 198
reserve, 9

Vivekananda, 210
Vocation of Man, 95
Voltaire, 70

Wakefulness, 123, 154
Waking Consciousness, 46
Wallas, Graham, 162
War, breakdown through, 13
as the father of change, 93
as perversion, 129
Warehouse corporation, 206
Waste Land, The, 116
Way of life, Athenian, 167
promethean, 200
universal, 99
We-ness, 43
Webster, Daniel, 163
WeUs, H. G., 5, 17, 191, 150
West, creativeness of the, 114
Western Churches, 177
Western civilization, 13, 223, 268, 288
breakdown of, 150
crucial transformation of, 231
fresh elements in, 112
the real goods of, 237
universalism of, 238
Western man, 26
Weston, Harold, 206
Wheeler, William Morton, 73
Whirligig of time, William James’s, 229
White man’s burden, 239
White Whale, The, 17
Whitehead, A. N., 190
Whitman, Walt, 54, 102, 105, 185, 190,
248, 292

Whole, orientation to the, 79
philosophy of the, 180, 224
sense of the, 216
Whole, Doctrine of the, 223-226
Whole Man, 182

Whole Man, The, as Ideal Type, 196-205
Wholeness, 192
religious sense of, 90
Whyte, Lancelot L., 73, 180
Will to Believe, The, 229
Wilson, Woodrow, 231
Wisdom, suppleness of, 146

INDEX

342

of the Body) The, 32
Witlwii'^wals 252, 253, 262
discipline of, 264
Womaj^, balanced, 288

modern, physical freedom of, 272
role of, in Greece, 183
Word, the, 223
Words, formal qualities of, 44
Wordsworth, William, 259
Work, compulsive, 259
Work Corps, International, 280
Work-chains, 32
World, the, 40
end of the, 18
impersonal, 229
post-medieval, 229
purposeful, 131
the symbolic, 48
World Constitution, 280
World Federalists, 223
World Federation, 207

World fellowship, 279
World Government, 206, 274
failure to create, 239
World organization, foundations for, -240
World views, need to universalize, -205
Worldly Wisemen, 3
Writing, as illustrative of purpose, 136
Wrong and rightivl22

Xantippe, 245

Yeats, John Butler, 46, 141
Yeats, William Butler, Autobiography of,
99

Yogin, 190
Yucca plant, 133

Zamiatin, E., 125
Zarathustra, 74
Zoroastrians, 78
Zossima, Father, 60, 268